Let’s say you are going to be in New England making movies amidst the fall color next week . . Nice, right?
Wouldn’t it be great if that video could actually look good on You Tube - instead of how it normally does?
Below, one set of Hollywood cinema experts share their settings.
If you were at the “Web Video is not TV” workshop last week at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association you would have learned about better video hosting options and QT settings to use for people who don’t enjoy a 100 MB upload limit or poorly compressed video. (You Tube’s limitation)
At PNA, we discussed what makes a go of good video playback on Blip and Brightcove, but first let us try to see if we can improve for the old You Tube.
The LA Final Cut Pro Users Group has a tutorial.
If your boss demands to see it on You Tube these Quicktime compression settings are supposed to you get the most of your crisp High-Def clips without cringing. Let’s give it a test drive.
Couple of key thoughts here from the LA filmmakers. Don’t make your output size any larger than 320 wide and use the highest data rate to get your file as close to the 100 MB limit as possible. That means a new workflow for a lot of us who have been used to “setting it 480 and forgettting it” . . let us see if it is worth it.
Here are their settings.
General Purpose Settings - Video up to 6 minutes in length
- H.264 video codec set to 2000Kbits/sec (2Mbits/sec or 250KBytes/sec)
- 320×240 video size (deinterlaced or simply use one field)
- Mono audio with AAC codec at 64 Kbit/sec (or 128 Kbit/sec for stereo)
- Recommended Sample Rate
- Best Encoding Quality
In the “Video Options” select Main Profile and Best Quality (Multi-pass).
These settings will be fine up to 800 Mbits aka 100 MBytes.
At the proposed settings, any file shorter than 6 minutes and 15 seconds will be within YouTube’s 100MB per upload limit.
To calculate the ideal setting for videos longer than this, visit the LA FCP group Web site.
BEFORE
This version was output last year using the QT PRo preset “Save as . . . Movie for iPod.”
it made a 5.5 MB .m4v file.
AFTER
This version was saved today using high data rate settings out of QT PRO.
The file size is 14 MB.
Hmm. I respect their thinking, but I just have to ask . . . How does that quality compare to a 4.7 MB version of the file (output at my usual 480 pixels wide/650k data rate) dropped on . . .
Blip.tv
Yep. That’s what I thought.
Very intersting. I’ll try this approach. It certainly is a mix between lowqual = small lowfile or hi qual = big large…
Cheers,
I
Very helpful post, with some great links. So this may be the dumbest question ever: Why is the YouTube player 480 wide in my browser if everyone is uploading at 320. Does this mean YouTube is scrunching everything down to 320 for storage then boosting it back up to 480 when it plays?
And why would they do that?
Cheers…Stephen
Thats right. There scaling it back up durring there own compression. there saving space. In fact they recommend 320 on the site. its actually scaling the video back to 425 by 318. A very odd 4:3 aspect ratio.
Well…
I’ve tried it all and my conclusion is… our compression setting don’t affect Youtube playback quality. (within reason, of course)
As a base standard i chose the Chicago Trib’s UTube review of Kung Foo Panda. In one clip there were thousands of CG arrows flying thru the shot. they all looked great.
I uploaded my video’s FLV file that looks great on my demo site, but on Utube…total crap; worst looking by far of all my upload experiments.
I did H264 at 640×480, 320×240, 425×319 and even 425×350 (having the crop off 10% from the edges). Once uploaded, no version was appreciably different from any other. I did notice, however, that different sections of my video had different levels of compression artifacting.
The 1st 2/3’s of my video is quite frenetic; lots of dissolves, flying 3D logos, film clips shot with lots of Rosco smoke and a ticker-tape graphic banner racing across the top & bottom of screen… this section looks like total crap; “Jello on ice”. However, the final 1/3 of my video is straight cuts of relatively motionless shots… and that section is very nearly acceptable.
Also, I upload a 5min piece from a slo placed documentary (h264-425×319) which looks just fine… but not as good as the Trib’s clips from Kung Foo Panda.
i suspect that bigger media outlets can get an inside trak.
Orwell Warned us: in communal societies, “…all animals are equal. Pigs are just ‘more’ equal”
The bigger companies do not get an inside track: I have a friend at Disney who is continually frustrated by the look of videos they post themselves on YouTube. They have been unable to get any answers from anyone over there about how to compress for best playback.