I reached the top! Video quality on YouTube

[Nate Callaghan]

I use blip.tv it seems to have better quality than youtube.

blip.tv (beta)

[Bill Mecca]

Shot with an HV30, edited in Vegas 8. I followed Ervin's steps verbatim except I upped the bit rate to 15, I exported form Vegas 8 using the Cineform intermediate codec, and it processed but no picture???

So I went back and exported uncompressed. On my system it looked good but waaaay out of sync. I took a chance and uploaded to Youtube. It's "still processing" and is in sync, but looked horrible, tons of artifacts. It is complex video of nature, lots of water, ripples etc. After it finished processing, it looks fine.
YouTube - Clean Clear Water

It's a little contest entry I did with my kids, simplistic at best, but they had fun.

[Ervin Farkas]

You first saw it with artifacts probably because their conversion program was still working on it.

15Mbps is probably overkill, but the final result is what matters, looks flawless to me.

[Bill Mecca]

yes, I figured that is what it was. I went high because of the complexity of the water etc. don't know if it made a difference since I didn't do it at a lower rate to compare.

BTW, I saved the preset, called it Farkas... ;)

[Ervin Farkas]

All you have left to do is some publicity for me on your website (just visited).

Just kidding. Glad it works for you! I love Streamclip, I can do so many things with it.

[Bill Mecca]

double post

[Mike Hardy]

This looks a fantastic workthrough using the MPEG Streamclip.
However, I shoot mainly in PROGRESSIVE, 25p (PAL). Would I still need to select the "Check Frame Blending and Better downscaling.
Check Deinterlace Video (deactivates Interlaced Scaling and Reinterlace Chroma)"? As my footage is FRAME based, I am thinking perhaps I do not select these? Or perhaps there are OTHER options to consider, when not shooting Interlaced footage?

[Ervin Farkas]

That is correct, both deinterlacing and chroma reinterlacing refer to interlaced video only; if your original video is progressive, checking it will not make any difference other than possibly increasing processing time.

Frame blending is useful if you a) change your frame rate [for example you go from PAL to NTSC] or b) have time streched portions in your footage (time remap).

Better downscaling is for the picky - better picture but very slow. Here's what the author of Streamclip says:

"If you are scaling the file to a smaller frame size, by checking "Better Downscaling" you can tell MPEG Streamclip to use a wider 2D-FIR scaler, providing even better picture quality. However this wide 2D-FIR scaler is quite slow and the resulting picture (although perfect) may have less sharpness. This option is disabled by default: enable it only if you need a perfectly scaled movie. If you are scaling the file to a larger size, this option has no effect; the standard 2D-FIR scaler already provides the best scaling quality."

[Paul R Johnson]

It's so complex trying to find the best way for individual material - the rendering and uploading process take so much time when you then find that the crucnhing they do to your files spoils them!

[Damon Roger]

What do you think?

YouTube - Summit Gear!

[Bryan Daugherty]

I would say the quality here is very good for youtube video. Good job. What did you use to render and at what settings?

[Damon Roger]

Hey Bryan,

Thanks for that. The video is near the youtube 10 minute limit. I used Vegas Pro 8.0 to render this for youtube as follows:

Quicktime using MPEG-4 format
frame size 1290X720
frame rate: 29.970000
Pixel aspect ration 1.000
data rate: unconstrained
keyframe every 30 (frames) - left this checked
quality slider at 75% - it actually could have been higher as I was under a gig and you are allowed up to 2 gigs when uploading.
audio sample rate set to 44.1 uncompressed - 16 bit stereo

[Ervin Farkas]

Some people will argue here (as they did with me) that your footage is "codec friendly" - there is no camera motion at all and basically the whole video is one long talking head.

Nevertheless, it is just perfect! It also has some good advice for audio processing we can use.

What is the bitrate of the video you uploaded?

[Damon Roger]

Hi Ervin,

Thank you kindly. I set the bitrate to uncompressed!

In the past I tried to set the bit rate to a specific value but in this instance I simply dragged the "quality" slider to a percentage of %75 percent. I am not sure what that really does with the nuts and bolts of the rending process.

Regards,

[Bryan Daugherty]

Damon, minor correction and correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you set the bit rate to unconstrained, not uncompressed, it is a nuance but the format is a compressed format so I think it does make a difference. Great footage and great output.