YouTube revolutionized the world of video making by giving anyone with a webcam the possibility to have their videos seen by millions of people. It's not enough to just make the tools available though, you have to make sure that as many people as possible are able to use them. Uploading a video to YouTube is a rather trivial affair already, precisely for this reason, and the video site is now introducing a new feature to help the more impatient users, a thumbnail "flipbook" to visualize the progress as YouTube analyzes the newly uploaded video.

"Starting today, when you upload a video to YouTube, you'll see a rapid-fire assortment of thumbnails from the video after it begins uploading to the site. Aside from being fun to watch (it's kind of like a flipbook of your video!), this visual representation of the process gives you further peace of mind that the video is indeed processing and will soon be live on the site," Dima Broyde and Slave Jovanovski, both Software Engineers at Google, wrote.

"Shortly after the last thumbnail arrives, your video is ready for viewing and sharing.* If you see the flipbook soon after you begin uploading, this means your video will be processed faster and you won't have to wait long for your video link," they added.

The feature is a welcome addition as the lack of feedback on the video conversion process was annoying for some. This way, you'll know exactly how far along you are and you'll also have an idea on how fast your video is being analyzed and converted to the formats YouTube supports. The conversion speed is important for the user, but it's equally important for YouTube, the faster it gets through a video, the faster it can move on to another one. And, with 20 hours of video uploaded per minute, every second counts.

This is why YouTube is sharing some tips on how to make sure your videos get processed faster. One way to do this is by creating a so-called "fast start" video, which means that the file index is at the start of the file so conversion algorithm doesn't have to go through all the data to get to it. For Apple fans, meaning .mov or .mp4 videos created with Final Cut Pro, iMovie or QuicktimePro, YouTube has set up a help page showing them how to optimize their files. For AVI files, this isn't always an issue as most have the index at the start of the file. Finally FLV, ASF or WMV formats don't have this type of problem at all.