Best YouTube workflow?

Post by **woods01** » Thu May 24, 2007 2:59 am

I was wondering what people feel is the best workflow for putting videos on YouTube? Frequently people complain about YouTube quality but there are plenty of videos on there that look remarkably good. I know there are other alternatives but lets face it Youtube has the largest audience and is most likely to be popular with less net saavy friends and family.

As a Mac user, I've tried using iSquint and 'export to cd-rom' feature in
iMovie. Both looked like average pixelated YouTube movies.

I've done a bit of research into this and found this great article:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/yo ... _gary.html

I havn't gone through its procedure yet myself but the best piece of
information in it is that while YouTube advises a 320 by 200 frame it
actually shows 425 by 318. Which seems like a good starting point for
limiting the compression.

Website · Post by **BigBeaner** » Thu May 24, 2007 6:48 am

I noticed this, and it's obvious, you have to shoot for what you're going for. For small videos on the internet like youtube, it's better to shoot closer shots instead of big cinematic wide shots. I noticed it that when details from long shots, things then to get muddied. Also having MCU's/CU's and a shallow dof usually comes out looking fine after all the compression.

Just my two cents on the non-technical codec stuff, which I don't know but I swear, I see a difference. For that I use Adobe Media Encoder, 1024K I think it was and came out looking great.

Post by **woods01** » Thu May 24, 2007 8:45 pm

Yes, shooting for YouTube is much like shooting Super 8, the wide shots
reveal the grain but close ups look great.

I've experiemented with a few different techniques and the results are
better when you leave things in a higher resolution and let YouTube do
the compression.

Note: Neither of my test uploads originated on S8.

This was converted to 320 x 240 prior to uploading and followed all
of youtube's specs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phfxR4e9ckI

(Sorry for making anyone watch this 'comedy') It pretty much looks like
a classic YouTube camera phone quality.

I then uploaded this old music performance of a friend shot years ago using less compression and a 425 by 318 frame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3fNwNyAt9U

The pixels are not as bad on this video, even the wide shots aren't so
bad. But I also chose to upload this because it was made mainly of
medium's and cu's.

Its not rocket science but clearly the farther you stray from YouTube's
reccomendations the better the results. The only downside is how slow
the upload is on the larger files.

Post by **mattias** » Fri May 25, 2007 12:09 am

videos are actually 320x240, only displayed bigger. click the little icon down left and it will shrink to "native" size. my experience is that the cleaner the video the better it displays. i use noise reduction and edge sharpnening then export as 320x240 high bitrate keyframe only mp4, the highest i can go before it gets too big for the specs. i can't say my videos look better than most, but they look better than when i first followed the youtube guidelines as well as when i tried higher resolution.

/matt

Post by **super8man** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:24 am

Ive been doing the standard mpg2 (720x480) size and then trying to stay under 10MB and loading those. Obviously, if you embed a small frame size on your own website, as I did on mine, they look "sharper." So, that's a thought as well you can try.

Cheers,
Mike

Post by **Rick Palidwor** » Fri May 25, 2007 4:37 am

mattias wrote: ...export as 320x240 high bitrate keyframe only mp4,

/matt

Can you elaborate on this a little more?
Rick

Post by **mattias** » Fri May 25, 2007 9:33 pm

i set frame size to 320x240, bitrate as high as possible (to stay withing the limit), and set keyframes to "all", which creates an intraframe stream which doesn't interfere with subsequent interframe compression. jpeg compression works too but there's a bug in the gamma correction in this qt codec which makes videos too dark.

/matt

Post by **audadvnc** » Fri May 25, 2007 10:10 pm

double post

Post by **audadvnc** » Fri May 25, 2007 10:12 pm

audadvnc wrote:I just watched a little YouTube - "Pirates of the Caribbean Premier Pt. 2". Audio synchronisation is about 4 seconds off!!! If Disney can't manage a webcast with basic sync sound, what chance do we have?

Post by **flatwood** » Sat May 26, 2007 12:04 am

Just make sure when you burn your pre conversion file (in my case avi on a windows platform) make sure your audio is set to interleve frame by frame. spend $15 and get DivX Converter and convert the avi to divx at the sizes mentioned by mattias. I was having trouble getting decent lip sync until I started doing this. It was Mattias who suggested DivX a while back. It works great. Thanks for the tip, Matt

Post by **Ghost Don't Walk** » Sat May 26, 2007 10:02 am

mattias wrote:i set frame size to 320x240, bitrate as high as possible (to stay withing the limit), and set keyframes to "all", which creates an intraframe stream which doesn't interfere with subsequent interframe compression. jpeg compression works too but there's a bug in the gamma correction in this qt codec which makes videos too dark.

/matt

Have you or do you use Sorenson Squeeze? I've had some pretty decent results with it.

Post by **mattias** » Sat May 26, 2007 11:54 am

i don't use sorenson squeeze but apple compressor. i'm not talking about how to achieve the best quality for the web here though, but the best quality for youtube. they re-encode everything, no matter what, so it's a matter of preserving as much picture information as possible, but not too much. a rather different problem from creatively throwing away information to lower the bitrate.

/matt