Crappy You Tube Quality from iMovie?

Hi All. I'm new to the forum and hoping I can get some advice! I created a small movie project in iMovie with some audio and still photo clips. I have a digital SRL camera, so the quality of my photos are excellent. When I create the movie on iMovie, it is clear, not blurry, beautiful. I then click the share button, click You Tube, click Medium, then publish. When I view it on You Tube, the quality of the movie is crappy! It is just ok when viewing it in the small mode, but when you view full screen, it just sucks. I don't understand why? I'm sure it has something to do with compression or something (I have no idea what that means but I did try to research) but I thought the You Tube option was supposed to handle that.

This is my you tube account link, and the video I am speaking of is "Shore with Boys May 2008"

www.youtube.com/souperjen24

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6_vFpg4GHc

Anyone have any ideas? Any advice would be great. Thanks!!!

Well, first, YouTube quality is crappy. They highly compress anything you give them. Of course there is more to it than that.

Second, just below the right of the video you see a link that says "watch in high quality". Click that and you'll see your video is much better. The big reason seems to be because UT uses much less compression. Some testing indicated to me that these higher quality videos have 3 times the data rate which would be a big deal.

Third, YouTube high quality is NOT hi-def. For that use something like vimeo or viddler or another service.

Fourth, expanding such a small, and crappy picture, to full screen is going to show all of the flaws in that tiny crappy picture. Truth be told, even blowing up a great quality small picture is going to look like garbage when expanded like that.

I've written a couple of video guides that might be helpful. You could create a hi-def video, export it, and put it up on a better service. You may also want to review the Macworld article about some of the other services.