Youtube compression.

[Alex Veitch]

Hello all

(Posting in this forum because the edit was in FCP6 and the final output was a 1080P quicktime.)

I have a recent job that has been uploaded by the company I was working for to youtube (their client's requirement). There are quite a number of compression artefacts apparent. Its a deliberately dark piece, but of course the non-youtube version is still clean (are are the raw files). The workflow was FCP6 to resolve to youtube. I've tried a test myself with different bit rates and its not helped to any noticeable extent.

Is there anything I can do to try and improve this? I've not included a link since I don't want to be accused of just spamming my work.

Thanks

Alex

 

[Nook Kim]

.. sucks. You don't have control over Youtube compression. If your piece is only for Youtube and such, best bet is to avoid compression breakers. Such as lots of fine tree leaves with bright background. The more contrast the worse end quality.

Since you've finished your work already, you can try to upscale the vid to 3K and upload. Youtube will give your vid another viewing option called "original", which is very slow to load but gives you much better quality. You just need to convince your client that that's how it's supposed to be viewed. I know that's very tough.

 

[Joel Arvidsson]

The main problem is that most people seams to use to low bitrate on the upload? What bitrate settings are you using?

 

[Alex Veitch]

..
Since you've finished your work already, you can try to upscale the vid to 3K and upload. Youtube will give your vid another viewing option called "original", which is very slow to load but gives you much better quality. You just need to convince your client that that's how it's supposed to be viewed. I know that's very tough.

Thanks for the advice. The output was from Davinci Resolve Lite, and I've not currently got access to a full version of Davinci for a 3K output. It was, as far as I know, uploaded from a 25 mbps copy (just found out) so there's scope for improvement there. The production company was my client, they were told it had to be via Youtube and easy access so I may not be winning any battles here. Anyway, thanks for the advice, its appreciated.

Cheers

Alex

 

[Gabe Conroy]

Another thing you may be able to do is apply noise reduction to everything (including shots that already seem clean). That can go a long way to intelligently removing detail, which ensures that the limited bitrate is being used for actual detail. It will cause a lot of banding, but you're basically trading between more banding and more blocking.

I know the Lite version of Resolve doesn't have noise reduction, but I believe you can use Neat Video as a plug-in in the latest version.

 

[Alex Veitch]

Hi Gabe. That sounds interesting - I shall try (and then try and win the argument on replacing the version thats online, ha). All best.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

There are ways to pre-process your video before youtube compresses it again to get perceptual increases in quality. Here is what I do for all of my clients:

Convert footage to 4:2:0 YUV with a high quality scaler since the one Youtube uses isn't optimized for professional footage.

Temporal Denoise cB and cR channels. I'm usually pretty agressive here since these aren't as visible to your eyes, but h.264 compressors will still dump a lot of bits here if there is a lot going on in the scene.

If the footage is not shakey, but has a little movement, sometimes reducing that motion can help you apply bits in a later scene. Youtube encodes video with a variable bitrate, and spending less bits in one scene allows you to spend more bits in another.

And lastly knocking out some details in the Y channel with a temporal denoiser if it's still really not looking up to snuff.

All of these pre-processing methods allows the h.264 encoder on Youtube's side to focus on images that are much easier to compress. Yes your video will look different, but all of my clients say that the results look _better_ than just uploading the video straight to YouTube/Vimeo