Sometimes I feel like the good folks at YouTube like to mix things up just to complicate my life.

Before I go back to playing Guitar Hero (which I’ve gotten exceptional at, thanks to Guitar Hero News, Media and Guides), I thought I’d share my frustration with you folks.

In response to users who have apparently made YouTube self-conscious by claiming that the quality of their videos left something to be desired, the kings of online video decided to introduce a new player with widescreen support.

Trouble is, nearly every video (with exception to those uploaded in the last few days) are not in widescreen format. The result is a bunch of videos floating in the center of a 960 pixel wide player. This is also another problem for those of us that use annotations in several videos.

And if you feel like evolving along with YouTube and want to actually upload widescreen videos, you’ll need to know how to render it as such. If you’re not very familiar with your video editing software, this may not be an easy task. For those of you that use Sony Vegas, I’ll show you how I went about successfully optimizing a video to be compatible with YouTube’s new widescreen format. Please keep in mind that I am by no means an authority on the software, and I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to go about this, but I’d just like to share what worked for me! The following was done in and should work with Vegas Professional 8.0 (may work with other versions as well):

• Change resolution in project properties to something big. I used the HDV 720-30p (1280×720 29.970 fps) preset.
• Go to “Render as” and choose Windows Media Video V9 (.wmv) from the pulldown menu.
• Choose “default template” from the template pulldown menu, and then click “custom”.
• Change video rendering quality to “best”.
• Click the “video” tab at the bottom. For image size, choose “custom”.  Enter a width of 864 and a height of 486. You may want to adjust the slider to 100% quality (but keep in mind it will inflate the file size of your video).
• OPTIONAL: Click the audio tab and change the bitrate to something a tad better. I use at least 128kbps (YouTube will heavily compress your audio, so don’t expect a huge difference).

Hopefully, at some point YouTube will make the widescreen player optional. But for now, it looks like we’re going to have to roll with it. If you check out YouTube’s official blog about the new widescreen here, you can see that the majority of user comments are negative (very negative, in many cases).

While I think it’s a great idea to offer that extra functionality, I think it’s a terrible idea to make every video page load a big widescreen player by default, regardless of whether or not the video is in that format. But I’ve got full faith and confidence in the people over at YouTube, and I’m sure they’ll work it out soon enough.