On this page
*Video compression is now only available to Clipchamp Utilities users.
Please have a look at this article for an updated post about this topic and see how the latest version of Clipchamp can help.
Many people are unhappy with the time it takes them to upload their videos to YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook. What should be an easy, quick last step after you’ve created a video that you want to share with the world often takes many hours, with the upload progress bar only moving in minuscule increments.
There are a number of factors that influence this upload time, some of which you can’t control, others you can but doing so costs money.
Some Factors Affecting Your Video Upload Time
The state of the YouTube/Google backend, which can sometimes suffer from temporary hiccups that cause your uploads to get slowed down.
The quality of your town’s, suburb’s, street’s, building’s or apartment’s internet infrastructure, which determines the available upload speed per connected household. (check out this video streaming quality meter provided by Google)
The number of devices that share your household’s internet connection. The more devices are connected while you’re attempting your upload and depending on what they do on the web, they all take away a chunk of the overall available upload bandwidth, i.e. the lower your computer’s share of it will be.
The type of connection between your router and your computer – WiFi or LAN cable
The age of your equipment – e.g. your router (what WiFi standard is it using, how many antennas does it have to communicate with the devices that are connected to it and how many devices are connected to it?) your computer (what WiFi connection speed is it capable of? Does it have the latest firmware for the WiFi chip?), etc.
A weak or dropping WiFi signal due to interference with other devices (e.g. your microwave oven)
A slow internet connection due to various other possible reasons.
However, all of these cost some money to rectify or can be impossible to improve on as you might already be on the fastest broadband plan available for your address with uploading still taking way too long.
One Solution You Can Use Right Now
The good news is, there is 1 simple step you can undertake right now to help speed up your YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook uploads:
Compress your videos before uploading them
It sounds simple. And it is.
compress videos on clipchamp to achieve faster youtube uploads
While it might not be the silver bullet for all circumstances, compressing your video and at the same time converting it into a modern format that YouTube, Facebook and similar sites can easily process (MP4 format, H.264 video codec, AAC audio codec) can make a huge difference in most cases.
Video compression shrinks your video’s file size down significantly before you upload it and modern online video converters and compression tools such as Clipchamp are able to do so while retaining your video’s resolution and visible quality.
This means you can upload your SD (480p), HD (720p) or Full HD (1080p) footage at full resolution and won’t have to trade faster uploads for lower video quality – you will end up with a video that looks the same as the original at a much smaller file size (see below for a sample I uploaded).
The Clipchamp free MP4 video converter and online video compressor helps you achieve this in a few easy steps without requiring any expert knowledge or prior experience. It comes with a number of output presets to choose from for 480p, 720p and 1080p video files.
Clipchamp lets you upload the compressed video directly to YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook without any extra tools. After the conversion/compression, you can upload your video directly.
Upload videos to YouTube directly in clipchamp - Step 1
Upload videos to YouTube directly in clipchamp - Step 5
Clever algorithms that work behind the scenes and the use of the most efficient video and audio codecs make sure that your video’s quality remains at a level on par with your input video.
Here is a sample Full HD video in 2 versions for comparison
The first one was not compressed before uploading it to YouTube and the second one was compressed using clipchamp before uploading it.
The uncompressed 1080p file size was 355MB and at my internet upload speed (0.85 Mbps, give or take), it took 72 minutes to upload.
The compressed 1080p file size was 6.6MB and at the same upload speed took 4 minutes to upload.
Please note that the significant difference in file size (compressed file at 2% of the original) can differ from video to video and depends on the codec, format, size, and bit rate of your input video.
Ready to speed up YouTube uploads?
Install the free clipchamp app in the Chrome Web Store now or use our online video converter directly at clipchamp.com
If you prefer to see how it’s done in a video tutorial first, here is one kindly created by Jack Hewitt.
Update: the latest clipchamp release now includes direct uploads to YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo. We updated this blog post accordingly to include Vimeo.
The screenshots in this post show an old Clipchamp version, the new one is much prettier!
