COMPRESSION FOR VIMEO AND YOUTUBE!

[Ershov Kirill]

Ok guys,I know maybe this thread is not so interesting but i hope anybody gonna help me cause i am tired of being confused: i have a red scarlet and the footage is great when i watch it on my computer but when i upload it to vimeo i dont have a perfect result. Everything is fine but i had seen a lot of your works that look so sharp at vimeo screen and if we open full screen they r practically the same.

https://vimeo.com/85937385
https://vimeo.com/74264577
https://vimeo.com/92691167

so check out these 3 examples if we open them in fullscreen mode especially the first one about snowboarding at full screen it is amazing and clean. no destroyed pixels artifacts etc. normally i have these problems with black and dark areas.
My workflow is FCPX after prores and than i prefer to use handbrake app. ALSO WANTED TO MENTION that at home my footage is perfect at small screen and at fullscreen everything shows me that red camera is working properly and my corrections dont destroy picture quality but maybe i am doing smth wrong with compression. also i have a pro account at vimeo so 1080p is allowed for me but still bad results.

please help me or maybe anybody could write me step by step workflow....

thnx everybody very much and sorry for such question)

 

[Diego Ramirez Budowski]

Hey dude,

I'm gonna jump in here with my recommendations, Although I am by no means a compression expert. Vimeo recoomends something like 5mbps-10mbps (megabits per second) with a variable bitrate (which basically means that it can be lower than the 6mbps, and the codec tosses information it deems as not critical, like certain blacks or out of focus areas).

In my experience you need something in the likes of 50 mbps at a constant bitrate h264 to get a super clean image once its compressed by vimeo. Remeber vimeo will recompress whatever file you give it. I usally feed it an mp4 at about 50mps CBR and get good results, but you could even feed it prores if you wanted to. The files are huge but the quality usually is worth it

Hope this helps. Im sure there are prolly people here more qualified to help you but just giving you my advice

 

[Michael Gregory]

Ershov, I have similar issues. I agree there must be some voo-doo in the settings. While I appreciate Diego's comments the problem with 50Mbs files is that they are huge for anything over a couple of minutes and Vimeo limits even Pro users to 20Gb a week. A 1080p file using h.264 compression at 40Mbs is about 14Gb... the upload takes hours then Vimeo compresses the hell out of it.

If someone can share their secrets I am sure the whole community will benefit from it.

Michael

 

[Michael Lindsay]

would love some really technical insights here...

basically we have found that we need to upload black at 16 and white at 235 to NOT crush or clip when I watch vimeo on a mac.. the problem is that on PC it looks washed out...

I agree that for best quality sending them very very large files is the only thing that works... just not practical!

We have all the main encodeing software (Sorenson etc) I'd PAY vimeo or YouTube to do the encode on myside and then it would just need re-wrapped.... Why don't they sell us an aplication to do this? After all they would benifit massivly from a speed POV and bandwidth cost?

any encoding gurus here?

 

[Phil Holland]

would love some really technical insights here...

basically we have found that we need to upload black at 16 and white at 235 to NOT crush or clip when I watch vimeo on a mac.. the problem is that on PC it looks washed out...

I agree that for best quality sending them very very large files is the only thing that works... just not practical!

We have all the main encodeing software (Sorenson etc) I'd PAY vimeo or YouTube to do the encode on myside and then it would just need re-wrapped.... Why don't they sell us an aplication to do this? After all they would benifit massivly from a speed POV and bandwidth cost?

any encoding gurus here?

Actually what YouTube has done is even better as you can now upload proRes 422 HQ and then they encode from the higher quality source. The problem really stems for transcodes being made off of lower bit rate H.264 as it's too lossy to be re-encoded without a visual knock to quality.

 

[Michael Lindsay]

Actually what YouTube has done is even better as you can now upload proRes 422 HQ and then they encode from the higher quality source. The problem really stems for transcodes being made off of lower bit rate H.264 as it's too lossy to be re-encoded without a visual knock to quality.

Thanks Phil

We have tested avid codec on youtube DNxHD ... and found the best compromise is DNxHD 120... 185X was too big and 36 not good enough.

a long GOP codec with 10bits and tranparecy to what it is up to would be great... is 265 that?

 

[Paul Russell]

youtube and vimeo also support the Cineform codec. So if you have plenty of bandwidth and a pro account you can ensure very high quality.

 

[Saumene Mehrdady]

just upload 422 files, it's worth the wait and your stuff looks way better

 

[Dan Rizzuto]

Over the last few days I did a short test. One was uploaded to Vimeo straight from FCPX and the other I used compressor exporting it as a ProRes 422 HQ file and uploaded it to Vimeo. The version uploaded right from FCPX is actually sharper. Thoughts?

FCPX Version: https://vimeo.com/112345339
ProRes 422HQ: https://vimeo.com/112642504

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Actually what YouTube has done is even better as you can now upload proRes 422 HQ and then they encode from the higher quality source. ...

This! As I understand it, Youtube recompresses everything. So, to avoid double compression, take the extra time to upload 422HQ and you'll get the best they have to offer.

 

[Will Steer]

I've helped a few people out with web video delivery over the past few years and I've found the general rule is:

1. If you can, upload a broadcast master-quality file i.e. ProRes 422, DNxHD, etc.

2. If bandwidth is an issue, upload a 25Mbps h264. Use the x264 encoder, it's the best one, it's free and it's open source and once installed will be available via quicktime in all the encoding software on your machine. Do at least a 2-pass encode. I find with H264 there are diminishing returns past around 25Mbps if the encoding is done well. I find a 2-3 pass encode with x264 in MPEG streamclip does the trick.

And to be honest, I mostly just upload h264 now.

would love some really technical insights here...

basically we have found that we need to upload black at 16 and white at 235 to NOT crush or clip when I watch vimeo on a mac.. the problem is that on PC it looks washed out...

I agree that for best quality sending them very very large files is the only thing that works... just not practical!

We have all the main encodeing software (Sorenson etc) I'd PAY vimeo or YouTube to do the encode on myside and then it would just need re-wrapped.... Why don't they sell us an aplication to do this? After all they would benifit massivly from a speed POV and bandwidth cost?

any encoding gurus here?

To answer the last part: the video is probably encoded to three different codecs to support multiple browsers via HTML5 video: H264 (for the commerical browsers); WebM and Ogg (Firefox and Opera). The amount of customers they have that would actually want to deal with the hassle of encoding to all three formats and then probably having to upload to a specific FTP folder is probably pretty small. I'm impressed they offer FTP uploading at all really. Plus the difference between three full HD encodes at Vimeo's HD bitrate and one well-encoded H264 isn't going to be that huge.

One thing that may help time-wise (although not with machine time) would be to use Vimeo's FTP function. Get the FTP details from Vimeo, then use Adobe Media Encoder or another piece of software that allows you to input FTP details. Once the encode is finished it will automatically upload the video to your FTP server. No manual upload needed, just hit go on the encode when you leave the office for the night.

 

[Dan Rizzuto]

This! As I understand it, Youtube recompresses everything. So, to avoid double compression, take the extra time to upload 422HQ and you'll get the best they have to offer.

I'm not sure about youtube but that doesn't work for Vimeo in my experience.

 

[Scott Lamoreaux]

Hi Guys -- I am doing my initial color correct/grade in RCX - save RMD - Import to FCPX on a 4k timeline. How are you guys exporting a 4k timeline at prores size compression? I have to choose h264 to keep the file size manageable for upload to youtube/vimeo. Anything prores 422 or higher is 4GB+ for 1 min of footage.