You don't need to buy an expensive digital video camera if you already have an iPhone, which shoots videos in high definition that you can share via YouTube. By default, the iPhone enables you to send videos directly from Camera Roll to YouTube, but a few things can interrupt this native behavior and prevent your videos from appearing properly -- or at all.
HD Videos
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The iPhone is capable of shooting videos in 720p high-definition quality, but uploading those videos to YouTube isn't as simple. HD video files are considerably larger than their low-resolution equivalents, so sending a video from the phone to YouTube could take a long time (and consequently time out). Additionally, the file transfer between the phone and YouTube has been known to compress the video and strip the HD quality. In some circumstances, these videos never appear on YouTube; in others, the videos show up with an HD version several hours later, after YouTube has re-encoded the videos.
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Using iMovie
If you use iMovie on the iPhone to edit the videos you shoot, you may run into trouble uploading the video to YouTube. IMovie's video format and the YouTube uploader have been reported to have some conflicts, so if possible export the video from iMovie and then upload it from Camera Roll to remove any compatibility issues. As with HD videos, HD videos that you edit in iMovie may not upload properly to YouTube directly from the phone.
YouTube App
The YouTube app for iPhone has been known to cause upload issues as well. You need to be logged into YouTube to upload videos, but the native YouTube support on the iPhone and the YouTube app sometimes conflict. Open the YouTube app and log out of your account and then try uploading the video again. If the upload fails, sign back into YouTube through the app and upload the file again from Camera Roll.
Timeouts
When uploading any file from your iPhone, check the state of the phone's Internet connection. If you're using 3G or 4G, consider that one minute of 720p footage takes up about 80MB on the iPhone. A five-minute video might be as large as 400MB, which could take a significant amount of time to upload and could use up all of your data allotment, depending on your contract. Upload from Wi-Fi to speed up transfers and avoid the video uploading timing out.