exporting from premier for youtube sharpness issues?

[Spencer Davies]

hey guys Im trying to export a project for youtube and even in 1080 im not impressed are there any export or debayer setting tips for h264 or web output? its a 4k project but it is just not sharp at all once i export it? any ideas

 

[David Kuhn]

Welcome to youtube... making $50,000 rigs look like camera phones since 2005. ;-) (I like Vimeo, which isn't perfect but generally looks a heck of a lot better than youtube)

 

[Nick Morrison]

In youtube, go to "advanced" in the uploads area, and they accept PRORES codec. You don't have todo H264.

 

[Mike Harrington]

youtube will re-compress to about 5mbps so you need the highest quality export you can feed it....

either go prores or crank out a high bitrate h.264...you can export a 4k h.264 or prores out of premiere and let youtube handle the downrez to 1080....might help with sharpness (never tried it though)

as for tips for h.264 always go vbr, perhaps from an uncompressed source if you want to keep render times down. And make sure your not changing frame rate or pixel aspect ratio from the original...try running the GOP at half the frame rate....and run a bitrate of 50mbps+ (for 1080p)

 

[Mark Britton]

Rendering video for YouTube is a good object lesson in how futile it really is to make critical judgements of the quality of any particular camera from something posted on YouTube.

It can also make you very angry when you've got something pretty good, and you realize how everyone is going to have to settle for the sausage that comes out the other end of the pipe.

 

[Marc Dunham]

I've gotten to the point where I just export an uncompressed file from Premiere, throw it in Handbrake to get a pretty nice looking x264 quickly and then upload that. Youtube is going to destroy the quality regardless.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

There are things you can do to master your video to have the appearance of higher quality on Youtube, you just have to understand the nature of what they are doing to your video.

Youtube will take whatever video stream you have, and size it down to 2048px across, convert it to YUV 4:2:0 video, and then give you an average bitrate of about 4.5Megabits per second. While you have no control over these constraints they present you there are ways to master your video track around these constraints to give your video the best chance for clarity and sharpness.

One thing you can do is not add any additional moving noise, like film grain in post. 4.5mbps average is not enough bitrate to even have that pattern show up. All you'll be doing is making your entire video look poor.

If you have high ISO shots, you'll want to do whatever you can to scrub the grain clean from the video. There are filters built into After effects that can help facilitate this process.

Another thing I do to help push the efficiency of the bitrate further, is to try and stabilize any shots that don't need any extra shake. The less movement in the frame, the more that your bits can be spent on keeping the image sharp.

I like to manage my own down conversions so that Youtube doesn't run it though their quick downsamplling algorithms. This means giving YouTube a file that is no larger than 2048px across in a YUV 4:2:0 format at TV levels (16-235). Youtube will bilinear scale your video by default which softens edges.

After you do this you can increase efficiency even further, by running a de-noise or blur algorithm on the cB and cR channels of your video. Denoise is ideal, but can take a long time to process depending on the method you are using. Be careful to check your shots for banding as 4:2:0 video tends to band very quickly without some sort of static dithering.

Doing all of the above will create a delivery that when compressed to 4.5mbps will look nicer than had you handed the video straight over, it will take some time and some artistry to make it right, but the results can be incredible when you do so.

Here's an example of doing all of the following: https://vimeo.com/42794049#

 

[George Butterfield]

Here's an example of doing all of the following: https://vimeo.com/42794049#

Some of the best youtubes are on Vimeo!

 

[Alexander Mejia]

Vimeo gives you an extra megabit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhukZ1d5Zwc

Here's the same delivery on youtube.

 

[Spencer Davies]

[COLOR=#FFFFFF !important]awesome thanks guys! i will try that I have uploaded pro res to youtube and it looks good in 2k but doesn't work on mobile which is really lame when 80% of the views come from mobile![/COLOR]

 

[Michael Jarvis]

In youtube, go to "advanced" in the uploads area, and they accept PRORES codec. You don't have todo H264.

Any alternative if using Premiere Pro. Premiere does not export Prores to my knowledge. Anyone using a better codec than H.264 out of Premiere when delivering to Youtube or Vimeo?

 

[Alexander Mejia]

There's no reason to give YouTube anything better than a 4:2:0, 8-bpc, TV levels, compressed media file because it will always go through their compression tools server side to make it less than 2048px across 4:2:0 YUV video.

Unless you think that Youtube someday will flip a switch and will re-encode video files at 4:2:2. They have re-encoded files in the past before at higher bitrates, but there are better gains to be made at 10-bpc than 4:2:2 for some media, so I don't anticipate them doing it.

You're just wasting your time uploading, and wasting possible optimization on your side before it gets run through their compressor.

 

[Greg McDonald]

Premiere does not export Prores to my knowledge.

It sure does as long as you have the ProRes codec installed on your machine.

 

[Gabe Conroy]

One thing I occasionally do if I'm feeling indulgent is I run Neat Video on every single shot, even shots that already seem clean. You'll get a lot of banding on YouTube, but if you didn't get banding you'd get mushy blocks...at least denoised it'll better allocate bitrate to detail.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

You can avoid banding by using static dithering. It's better than a noise pattern since it doesn't move and only appears where banding occurs. I use one in AVIsynth called GradFun2db.

 

[Michael Jarvis]

It sure does as long as you have the ProRes codec installed on your machine.

Installed and running. Thanks man.

 

[Gabe Conroy]

You can avoid banding by using static dithering. It's better than a noise pattern since it doesn't move and only appears where banding occurs. I use one in AVIsynth called GradFun2db.

That works to some extent for Vimeo, but Youtube typically just throws the dithering away and goes back to banding or it turns into blocky mush.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

static dithering wont be thrown away if your footage is optimized correctly. A noise or film grain pattern, yes.

As long as it doesn't move you'll see good results.