60D video help

Hello, i have bought my first camera, a 60D as i want to shoot some videos of my friends son singing and playing guitar in some music venues and create Youtube videos.

The issue i have (apart from knowing just about nothing about photography) is that the photos i have taken are fantastic and also the videos we played back on a HD TV looked fantastic as well, but when we download the videos onto a computer they look "jerky" and dont play well at all in the canon software, quicktime player and or real player and given this we haven't tried to upload to Youtube yet.

Keep in mind we are shooting straight out of the box with this, are we using too high a resolution or something? Or will the videos be fine when uploaded on Youtube in this format even though they are jerky?

Basically what im asking is what settings should we be using/filming in for video so we can watch them back on computer and Youtube without the problems we are having. I'm assuming we are using the incorrect settings ATM.

My friend shot video of my band recently on his 7D and gave me the files and I had the same exact issue... Pretty sure it's just that the computer is not good enough to handle the files.

adollarwodbnice wrote in post #12773452
My friend shot video of my band recently on his 7D and gave me the files and I had the same exact issue... Pretty sure it's just that the computer is not good enough to handle the files.

That's my thoughts also as my Dell is 4 years old now, but i have also stumbled onto another thread which leads me to think the camera comes out of the box set up at maximum performance levels which are not ideal for YouTube videos for example, so i need to find out what settings others use/recommend for YouTube vids.

If you are just using it for your tube, change the settings to 720P. 1080P will always be a great resolution but for youtube, it's overkill especially for band stuff Try lowering it to 720P and see what happens.
It's probably the computer. I have 1080P and it works just fine on my laptop but on another laptop, it's choppy and very hard to edit. But I tested it with 720 and it worked better but still slightly choppy.

have you tried VLC Media Player ? It's a very light app for playing videos

Definitely, the computer cannot handle the files. You could always convert them to a more friendly format or compress them more to have smaller files. But of course, that would be like buying a Ferrari and drive it at 35 mph.

Jerky video is usually caused by the hardware not being able to handle the video usually. The format Canon uses is a finished format which is why you read so much about converting the video to a more simple format for editing. I would guess you're computer wasn't able to handle the files which led to it being sporadic. A better video card and more ram (at a minimum) should clear it up (my 5 yr old dell laptop would cough all the way through video playbacks).
My Toshiba R705 with i3 and 4G of RAM has never had a problem with video.

Thanks everyone for the help so far, looks like its my computer then rather than anything else, someone also today recommended i use "handbrake" ill check that out as well, anybody using this program BTW?

I discovered that the culprit of dodgy video playback was actually having our computers on "power saver" rather than performance, now it works without a problem.

Yeah that will do it. Power saver mode chokes the CPU and the graphics acceleration, particularly on a laptop. 99% of the time the issue is not the actual video file being choppy, it's that the computer cannot handle it. If it plays back fine on the camera or on a TV then it is definitely the computer. Some of the newer video codecs are extremely complex to decode and older machines that don't have the CPU power to do it in software or don't have a new or powerful enough graphics system that has hardware support for it.