Bad youtube results
 

We did a quick little 1:40 sec interview for a blog. I shot in SD 60i on manual with the builtin preset A (I believe, new to presets) with gain as high as 6db in low ligh and the iris adjusted, sometimes fully open. Edited in FCE in a NTSC DV timeline and it looked soft, and a little blotchy when played in quicktime. Also noted strips in shirts and curtains tended to shimmer.

I outputted a 640x480 movie using mpeg4, ACC, 32khz mono, 30fps. Looked ok in quicktime. The file was about 75mb, and was uploaded to You Tube.

The results on Youtube showed a "heavily compressed", almost unwatchable video. the audio was fine.

So what did I do wrong? what file type and specs do you output for You Tube and other flash based video sharing sites? Any help is appreciated.

hmmm not sure about 640X480, but I use the following settings and it comes out decent.

MP4 format

428X240 for 16:9
320X240 for 4:3

29.97fps progressive

1.5Mbps VBR 2 pass
128bit audio

for 1:11 spot I did recently the file size came out to 9MB and looked better than the 720X480 80MB Avi I initially tried. YouTube does a horrible resize IMO, so I always start by bringing the res down myself. I'm still working on making it look incredible, but for 9MB, it looks decent to me.

Why don't you show us the video to illustrate what you mean. Hard to guess what the problem is, because there are lots of variables that can effect how a video will look on YouTube.

Doug:

We have chosen to submit wmvs with the following settings:

640 x 480
29.970 fps
variable bitrate
we adjust the render quality to keep the file size as close to but under 100 megs

All the sites accept the wmv and youtube seems to do a good job converting them.

Please let us know what solves your problem.

Don

Lets face it the quality on You Tube is awful... pretty hard to make anything look good.

Why not try stage 6 or Vimeio (I think thats what it is called), I use stage 6 and have been pretty happy with the results.

Jon

Different sites use different kinds of video compression. YouTube is pretty harsh but not impossible to get a watch-able image.

Google for optimal youtube settings. I made a youtube template for wmv in Vegas based on a google result and I was happy. You match their size but up the bitrate, IIRC. I don't have my editing comp handy or I'd just give you the settings.

JR

sorry ben. we were just running around collecting comments, but here it is in all it's blotchy glory. The xha1 is my first real prosumer cam so i'm pretty new to manual shooting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPBqki3WgUw

I sure see much better results than what I got on youtube. Also that quicktime using mpeg 4 at 29.7 even at 1:40 was still 55mb to upload.

I'l try the wmv next I guess.

It's not that bad Doug, it looks no worse than thousands of other YouTube videos. Between the available light and what sounds like the on-camera mic, I don't think you could expect much better to be honest.

But I've seen so many different recipes for "optimal" YouTube encoding, so just keep experimenting until you find something that looks really nice at 320x240 or 400x300 and the YouTube encoding won't inflict too much damage.

Thanks, I'll keep trying. BTW, I was using the Rode NT1. Think I can get better sound using it in those situations (besides a lav)?

I don't know if this is still valid but I've read several times that if you use the .flv codec, Youtube will leave it alone and won't recompress since that's the codec they use for conversion anyway.

Moved from Canon XH to Web Video Delivery.

FLV files are also recompressed these days

I have the Rode and it is just an OK ambient mic for my purposes, it doesn't seem to have nearly as much isolation or detail as a proper shotgun mic (hence the price difference).

For those noisy situations and "man on the street" interviews, you really need a good shotgun or stick a decent wireless lav on the subject to be able to hear them. Short of that, just get as close as you can to the speaker (asking them to raise their voice can help too).

Thanks for the feedback Ben. What shotgun do you like? We almost always try to lav, but sometimes you just have to run and gun. Since this is typical of what we're doing following this project, I would consider getting a higher quality shotgun, so what do you suggest? BTW, your you tube stuff looks great, so I must be doing something very wrong. Need to get that resolved at some point.