Below I’ve pasted a long list of all the little things you have to do to go from iMovie to YouTube. With the billion videos on YouTube, you’d think adding a video is about as difficult as scratching yourself. Umm, not quite. This is based on a great how-to that I condensed from the Thoughton Digital Life blog.

-Highlight the video in the Clips panel so that it is displayed in the large preview window. Go up to File:Export.

-Choose ‘Expert settings’. Click ‘Share’.

- You should be in the Save dialog box now. Click on the ‘Export’ drop-down menu and choose ‘Movie to QuickTime Movie’. Click Options.

-set it to H.264 video with AAC audio

-You should now see the Movie Settings panel. In the video section click ‘Settings’.

-Set the ‘Compression Type’ to H.264 with a frame rate of 15 fps with automatic key frames. Medium or High works well.

-Back at the Movie Settings panel, click the audio ‘Settings’ button.

-choose an audio format. Set the format to AAC, choose Mono from the channels drop-down menu, change the ‘Rate’ (frequency) to 22.050 kHz, and choose a target bit rate of 24 kbps. Click OK. (Take a juice break if you are experiencing any fatigue at this point.)

-Back at the Movie Settings panel again. Make sure ‘Prepare for internet streaming’ is deselected.

-Still at the Movie Settings panel, check the ‘Preserve aspect ratio’ box using ‘Letterbox’. Check the ‘Deinterlace Source Video’ box. Click OK.

-Back at the Movie Settings panel,… hopefully for the last time. Click OK.

-You should now be back at the save dialog box. Give your exported movie a name, and click ’save’. iMovie will now show you a progress bar for your export.

Wow, that’s it. Go to YouTube > log in > click Upload > and you’re good.

Remember that any sound files involved need to be MP3.

Thanks Thoughton for helping navigate this process!