Best render settings for YouTube?

TheChrisD

I'm just curious as to what the best render settings are to give the best quality videos on YouTube.

I render my videos at 1080i, 29.97fps (which is pretty much equal to source) in .m2ts format (mainly as .mp4 doesn't give me a thumbnail on my computer). Hoever, on YouTube the video doesn't seem to play as smoothly as some others I've seen out there.

So I'm just curious as to what the best settings are, or even what do other people render at so I can make a comparison to see if there's something I could change to improve things?

Tallon

720 is fine for youtube.

It will load ok on a decent connection and also its fine for online viewing.

It also has the benifit of rendering faster and uploading faster

TheChrisD

It's not the 720p vs 1080p that's bugging me really. I can render and upload in either if I wanted to.

Comparing a 720p vid I did with my recent 1080p vids, maybe it's the fact that the 720p (and these other equivalent videos I'm seeing) is in WMV, yet my 1080p are in M2TS? But when I tried a 1080p in WMV, YouTube royally ****ed up the sound...

Tallon

Thats what I meant by 'fine for youtube'

They're encoding is crap, so 720 is the best / highest setting to use.

I've uploaded a few in 1080 but it's only a marginal that notice or benifit from it so hardly worth taking the time to render or even record in anything higher.

If you were uploading to the likes of Vimeo it would be a different story as tey're quality is stand out in 1080p

TheChrisD

It's weird.

Just did a test upload of the same video in both WMV and M2TS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnCUl8xMEH4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTh01oSMIw4

The M2TS has better colour, seems more vivid; yet the WMV seems to have motion blur. But it's this motion blur that makes it look like it has a better framerate than the M2TS, if you know what I mean?

Tallon

I'm on mobile so I'll have a gander in the morning in work

TheChrisD

Ok cool. Just a quick note, I made the WMV version public and changed the title, so it's the one specifically not titles M2TS version :P

bokkenspiel

you cant tell the difference between 720p and 1080i. the eye doesn't notice enough difference to tell them apart. the best settings are 720p, MPEG4 for the video and WMA for the audio. the 720p will make it a smaller size than 1080i, so you will have a quicker upload time.

TheChrisD

I couldn't before, now with a proper 1080p monitor, I can.

I don't need to worry about filesize, I have an absolute crap-ton of room on my hard drive, and even full 15:30 videos are nowhere near two gigs.

Dublin_Gunner

To me, the M2TS version looks crisper.

Seems as thought the WMV version was encoded at a different frame rate or something, leading to a bit of ghosting.

Is the WMV 25~ and the M2TS 30 or something? The M2TS seems to have a higher bitrate encode also.

TheChrisD

Both of them were rendered at 29.97, since the source media is 59.94.

The bitrates are different, WMV was given a 10M max, whereas the M2TS was given a 16M max. The WMV uses up the 10M max, whereas the M2TS only went to 13.5M.

The thing is that I've noticed that whatever way YouTube takes the different file formats, AVCHD ends up looking quite choppy, whereas whatever it does to WMV makes it look as if it's being played at a higher framerate, at least to my eyes.

However, oddly, locally on my machine, it seems to occur the other way around. So there's obviously something YouTube has with encoding AVCHD that kills the quality. See for yourself and compare them to the uploaded versions:
WMV: http://stuff.thechrisd.com/vids/You fat **** - 3.wmv (35.1MB)
M2TS: http://stuff.thechrisd.com/vids/You fat **** - 3.m2ts (46.6MB)

Dublin_Gunner

TheChrisD wrote: »

Both of them were rendered at 29.97, since the source media is 59.94.

The bitrates are different, WMV was given a 10M max, whereas the M2TS was given a 16M max. The WMV uses up the 10M max, whereas the M2TS only went to 13.5M.

The thing is that I've noticed that whatever way YouTube takes the different file formats, AVCHD ends up looking quite choppy, whereas whatever it does to WMV makes it look as if it's being played at a higher framerate, at least to my eyes.

To me, the WMV looks like its a lower framerate, but the same length if you get me? Liek each frame lasts slightly longer.

Weird. You'd expect that at this stage WMV would be one of the better handled files. Might be the compression that YT can't handle properly.

Magill

I find that adding some basic effects is what really makes the difference when it comes to quality tbh, i usually just use the standard 720p render settings (Highest quality or whatever it is), but i add all my color correction/curves and sharpening effects which make it stand out a bit more. Theres a **** load of render setting videos on youtube tho.

Sisko

Bah forgot all about this forum

Beat Mass Effect 2 a few weeks back and spent the following couple of weeks making videos from the game but I had all sorts of issues with the quality and frame rate on youtube.

Kept taking the vids down and re upping them with different codecs and bitrates and in the end I just said **** it and left 'em up.


Vids were 50fps so I assume youtube turning them to 30fps was half the problem. Meh.