Youtube: same setting, different results! Huh???

[Ali Jafri]

Hi people. I've encountered a rather frustrating problem! I uploaded a video to Youtube, realized that I could crop the end a bit more, edited it, and then uploaded it again with a different name but the quality is now much worse than the previous upload!!!

See for yourself in the pic attached! The right portion is the first upload - the left portion is the second upload. I'm watching both videos in the high quality setting that youtube now has.

I've tried everything but I keep getting the same pixelated result. Its even more embarrassing since I used the previous clip as a sample sent to my client who now expects the same quality upload!

The compression settings I used in both videos is 480x360 WMV CBR 1MB 30fps

Anyone encountered this same problem? Anyone know how to solve it?

[Ervin Farkas]

They may have changed the way they encode to flash... but 1Mbps is very low for HD!

See my post I reached the top! Video quality on YouTube - The Digital Video Information Network

[Ali Jafri]

Hi Ervin

I did follow your thread with great interest. The only thing is that StreamClip takes quite a bit of time to render!

I'm working with SD footage to begin with so I see no point in going HD. The footage I have has been recorded from VHS tapes and rendered as mpeg1, so you can see why going HD won't have much benefit. I have around 100 videos to edit and upload in the next few days so you can see why for me time is of the essence.

I'm using Vegas to render, which I believe is faster than Premiere. Since I work on a PC I wouldn't know about FCP.

In the Youtube forums someone said that while processing uploaded files youtube will actually bring down the resolution of the entire video if it encounters a difficult or complex portion of the file. This is why I'm experiencing varying levels of pixelation and artifacting. I'm not sure if its true but it makes a lot of sense, how else can anyone explain my problem?

[Ervin Farkas]

I don't quite understand. I am not familiar with the "watching in high quality" option you mention. I thought you tried to uprezz your footage to make Youtube "think" it's HD - the only new feature I am aware of is "watch in HD"...

I suspect your bottleneck is the MPEG1 file, that's low quality to start with, and obviously every new encoding adds a little to the quality loss. I see no point in transcoding to wmv... what is your reason for doing that?

Can you e-mail me a small ORIGINAL file (under 10MB) to play with?

efarkas at mdea.com is my address.

[Ali Jafri]

actually, its not the mpg video that's bothering me. Its the introduction sequence which is all text animation. Its like a fly-through between a lot of text lines. This animated sequence gets botched up on youtube, the mpg video stays fine.

They say the fast-moving details of the text animation is what is causing the compression artifacts. If I had used a relatively still slide then it would have come out better. Oh well, too late for that now!

Since this is for a client it would be unethical for me to email you the source file of the animation. I hope you understand. I would really like to discuss more compression techniques with you if you're willing. I mostly work with 4:3 PAL footage.