If you are on facebook and also do a bit of video editing, you're probably quite into the idea of being able to upload your videos to facebook so that all your contacts get notified. I am. But I want those videos to be as high quality as they possibly can be.
So I wrote to facebook to ask them what would be the best sizez and settings to use to create the highest quality facebook videos as possible.
Here's the reply I got, which is actually very helpful :)
Subject: VIDEOS: video
User id: 703605104
Description of problem: Could you tell me what the optimum video dimensions/compression codec and framerate are to get the best out of the facebook video application?
thanks very much,
Chris Dorward
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071019 Firefox/2.0.0.8
Facebook always rescales and encodes all videos uploaded to the site. The system rescales to a maximum dimension of 626 pixels, so if you don't want our video processor to rescale the source file, you should size your video to that dimension. So if your video is under 626pixels wide or tall, we don't rescale it, but if it's larger than those dimensions, we'll resize the video to that size ratio.
Facebook also encodes the video at 30fps, so if you upload a 30fps clip, the encoding should not alter the video's frame rate when it's processed. You should upload the video at the highest possible bitrate that allows the video to fall within Facebook's size limit restrictions. Let me know if you have any further questions.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Cody