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Red Footage to Youtube

coyne113

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I have been shooting a web series on the red. This is the second episode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEtHz8lmyis&feature=channel_page

What is killing me is finding a good way to compress to go to youtube. There are a few shots that are HVX. The show open was shot on HVX and the rest of the show on the red. The HVX footage ends up looking better. Our post work flow was editing with proxies in FCP 422 apple pro res. And then using compressor to got to H264. Does anyone have any good ideas as to a better way to compress for youtube?

Also if anyone has seen any other red footage on youtube that looks really good please post it.

Thanks,
Chris T K Coyne
Red owner
#1682
 
Grade

Grade

YouTube will be YouTube. I don't have any great RED YouTube footage to point you to. But I find RED footage to be flat in its native form (that's a good thing). From my HD YouTube compression experience, you need to push the gamma and color saturation over what you think a normal amount should be. YouTube's (flash) compression seems to flatten the image back down.
I use H.264 at 1280x720p, 6Mb CBR video with 44.1/192Kb AAC audio.
 
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Thanks for the tip. Do you compress that out of compressor or another program. If youtube is flash it seems like maybe a .flv movie file from a program like cleaner might work better. Do you have any youtube examples of the compression you mentioned?
 
YouTube and HD

YouTube and HD

Here's an example of mine shot on a Canon XH-A1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTl71MawrJs&feature=channel_page
Using PPro to edit and compress. I think YouTube will allow you to upload a .flv file now, but they didn't for sometime and it looks like they don't recommend it.

Here's YouTube's recommended HD settings.
http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=132460&topic=16612&hl=en-US

Note: Only 44.1kHz audio works for HD. Others may encode fine to standard YouTube playback, but the HD version will then not have any audio.
 
Did you guys even watch his video?

Yes, there is the difference in saturation between the HVX and RED footage, the biggest difference I see is the cinematography and art direction.

The opening sequence is constructed of all good out door shots of a city, while the show is indoors done sort of documentary style. The two can hardly be compared. Perhaps the best way to match the more colorful and stylized moves of the open would be more art direction with the biggest change coming from painting the white rooms in the beginning. The Party scenes look much better for that look.

As for cinematography, you might want to try adding more back light to shots to make your actors pop more. Also more wide shots might help, there are very few, where as the open is almost all wide. The lack of wide shots make it feel a bit claustrophobic.

As for the footage itself, the RED is not naturally sharpened so much, while the opening looked to have a good deal of sharpening applied, so that might help as well.


I personally enjoyed it for what it was. I almost felt the opening could use some shots from the show to incorporate it better with the show. Think The Office.

-AG
 
Knowing

Knowing

Knowing was shot 100% on RED. (Everybody knows that,i know).
Just pointing out the link to the trailer.
What lens and lighting did you use?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR126-rJiW8&feature=PlayList&p=DF1C60258CCCB6B2&index=0&playnext=1

This "Knowing" link to YouTube is not an HD file.
If your asking me about my video, It's the basic XH-A1 lens, no adapters.
Just a polarizing filter. All natural light with a 6x6 silk and a silver bounce card.

I also recommend Vimeo.
 
looking at all the posts it is clear that red to youtube is always slightly different. I am thinking now that another part of it is the shallow DOF on the red footage. I was shooting speeds wide open for most of the show and the HVX footage, shot by the directors, was probably at an F22 and a skinny shutter. All that said. I watched it from apple TV on an HD Plasma I noticed a lot more digital artifacting in the red footage and less in the HVX, especially when comparing how fast motion looked in comparison. This is probably due to the bit rate and something happening when compressing.

I also have to say, it is also really cool to see how international the red community is.

Chris T K Coyne
Red #1682
www.christkcoyne.com
 
X264

There is an error in the H264 compression concerning a gamma shift. Some programmers created a free alternative called X264, and put it up for free download. I haven't tried it yet, but it may relate to your issue.

Compressing to H264 definitely gave me headaches in the past.

Thanks for the idea. Did you take x264 to youtube? Or where did you end up using it? Do you have any examples links?
 
looking at the other things that are posted on this thread I have learned a few things. There is a huge difference between your youtube experience and the computer your are using. This seems obvious to me now. I was first looking at red youtube posts on apple tv, not in HD, and then on an apple G4 laptop and Finlay on 17in mac book pro(about a year old). The mac book pro was significantly better quality.

The other thing I have noticed is that youtube in HD has a huge variance in play back rates. There is some variance that is dependent on the computer. But so far I have not seen youtube red footage in HD play with out dropping frames. If your computer does not have problems with this please post the specks?

All in all the internet needs to catch up to the red. At the same time it is important to produce good red content on the internet. This will allow us to be able to convince clients and producers that shooting the red for internet distribution is worth while.
 
Youtube HD...

Youtube HD...

...
I use H.264 at 1280x720p, 6Mb CBR video with 44.1/192Kb AAC audio....


Thank you guys. After trying all the codecs and setting i managed to take my video on youtube at a good quality.

If this info is useful for someone, i'm glad.
Working on a Mac Pro
Shot on RED 2k@25p
I had a 2k sequence wich i imported in a 720p sequence and right clicked the 2k sequence in the timeline and clicked "scale to frame size"

(I did that because i encountered problems with the quality when i was setting the frame size from the codec settings.)

exported with File>Export>Media...

media encoder pops up and i used the settings:

Fromat: H.264

at the video tab
TV Standard: PAL (my case - Europe)
1280x720
Framerate:25
Field Order: Progressive
Square pixels (my case)
Profile: High
Level:3.2
Bitrate Encoding: CBR
Bitrate (Mbps) : 6

my uploaded video was a little washed out so i applied a gamma filter to my clip the default was 10 so i shifted the amount to 13 and got the look i wanted...

now i need to export the video for the client so he can see it on a pc... at maximum quality...

at least i managed to solve the problem with the final destination of the video.

hope the info was helpful. And thank you for sharing.
 
There are 3 big reasons you guys aren't getting the results you want from youtube:

1) Quicktime Gamma shift

2) Pre-processing issues.

3) in-correct color space.


In order to to get a correct gamma to Youtube, you need to deliver in a file format that doesn't shift the gamma. As of now, Quicktime will always assume 1.8 gamma and translate your native gamma 2.2 video into 1.8 for Apple Quicktime. Even if you fix the problem via a meta-data flag you add to the file, not all video uploading services will honor the flag.

Depending on the native resolution you're working in with your red footage, it's probably not what you're uploading to youtube. Scaling in your NLE is another source of quality degergration. If you aren't scaling in Red Alert or Red Cine, you're loosing quality doing it in FCP, or Premiere Pro.

Also, you will want to make sure you re-time your footage for Gama 2.2 sRGB color space. If you're uploading a direct Rec.709 colorspace clip it will appear less colorful, and more washed out than you had expected it. even worse if you're working in Rec.601.

If your client is demanding a high quality youtube version of the video, You should look into having a professional handle it. There are other things in pre-processing other than scaling that help Youtube compress down the file better. Check out some samples I've done for other users online:

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTHpUut8htI

Those were HVX-200 clips from an SG-pro that I cleaned up.

PM me if you're interested in my services.
 
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