Encoding For YouTube with Vegas

**irishmark** · 03-11-2007, 01:05 PM

One must also consider that every video is diffrent. The above video is and should be treated as a guide.

To get the best results i suggest yuo render out a small 5 second segment and upload that. then tewak your encoding settings as appropriate to get the best results. Yes its alot of faffing about but if you want crystal celar videos everytime then this is a sure fire way of getting there. - Remember YouTbe is not intended to be a professional service. If it was there would be far more controls over how one uploads a video and there would be more info on how to encode in the best possible ways.

**timtak** · 03-12-2007, 01:05 AM

Dear Irish Mark

Thank you very much for your responses.

Too Big? Your video is almost 10 mins long so of course its gonna be large. When the video is at 1Mbps but it will be fine - it'll just take a while to upload.

When I said that wmv is too big I mean that my 10 minute video would not have been allowed had I used wmv because it would be larger than the 100MB limit. The video was about 99MB in "Main Concept avc/acc mp4" and I think that wmv is about twice the size. That means I would only be able to upload 5 minutes in wmv. Since my videos are boring, this would be no great loss perhaps but...

The point being MP4 is a really crappie video format to re-encode.

Minor point, I am not sure why you say "re" (in "re-encode") because my original video was not mp4 but avi, this time now that I am using the Sony DCR VX2000 camera.

To get the best results i suggest yuo render out a small 5 second segment and upload that. then tewak your encoding settings as appropriate to get the best results.

Yes...

Tim

**timtak** · 03-12-2007, 02:04 AM

Moving back to the wmv settings used in the introduced by Irish Mark: the settings are I think as follows

And the result is (5MB)
http://ds21.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~econotemp/yasuko.wmv
And soon at Youtube

The original avi files (about 28 MB) are clearer. The windows media video above is sort of underwater. That is to be expected of course, since it is compressed, but [video=youtube;03p3UlvkAT4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZllfQZCc2_M"]lonelygirl15[/URL] and others on YouTube, as well the video by [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03p3UlvkAT4[/video], seem to be getting better definition. Is it just because their originals are better?

**timtak** · 03-12-2007, 03:44 AM

Returning to MP4, which is what YouTube recommends, there are two mp4 options in Vegas 7.

This is Sony AVC/ACC mp4

In the Custom settings screen 1Mbs was not a menu option but it was possible to type it into the video bit rate box by hand.

Here are the settings Sony AVC/ACC mp4

And here is the video
http://ds21.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~econo/temp/yasuko.mp4
and soon, here it is on YouTube

It may be a bit better than the wmv but only marginally.

I will post the Main Concept version in my next post.

The YouTube Instructions recommend " MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid)."

Does anyone know what comes closer to Divx, Xvid out of "Sony" or "Main Concept" (the Vegas 7 rendering options)?

**timtak** · 03-12-2007, 03:46 AM

And here are what I presume to be the settings for the Main Concept AVC/ACC mp4.

Again it was not possible to select 1,000,000 bps in the bit rate menu but it was possible to type it in. I decided to use "Main" instead of "Baseline" but I don't know what they are.

Here is the video (5MB)
http://ds21.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~ec...in_concept.mp4
Here soon at YouTube

None of them look very different. All look worse than the original avi (28MB)
http://ds21.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~econo/temp/043.avi

And, all seem quite a lot worse than the quality of lonleygirl15's videos

or the post introduced at the top of this thread by Irish Mark to the really good quality video of Mr. Safety, here. (the black and white bit at the beginning)

Some YouTube videos are really good quality.

Tim

**timtak** · 03-12-2007, 02:18 PM

Mr Deity (anti-religious comedy) uses a HD camera and different rendering size to get excellent images on Youtube.

But this may be because he is shooting in high definition but all the same, he seems to be ignoring the Youtube directions completely and compressing to 480 x 360.

http://www.mrdeity.com/faq.html
What do you use to shoot the show?
We shoot on a Panasonic HVX200 in 720p High Definition DVCProHD. we edit the show in Final Cut Pro HD on Macintosh computers.

How do you get your stuff to look so good on YouTube?
I think it has a lot to do with the quality of the camera (garbage in, garbage out, etc...). Before uploading, I convert the file with QuickTime Pro to h.264 (What?), 480x360 pixels at 24fps, better quality, and with a keyframe every 24 frames.
The audio is set to AAC, VBR 96-110, 32k stereo.

**irishmark** · 03-12-2007, 02:27 PM

It shouldnt matter what its shot on. High Def or not. - Obviously if it is shot on something very poor then it will come out poor but what we are looking at is a video that has come out of a final render looking good then getting that to look good on youtube.

If one produces a sequence in After Effects that is crisp and clean using only graphics you will get the same results. This is why my stance on the tutorial is flexible. While most stuff is fine i did a graphics sequence that came out on youtube looking like crap but the AFX rendered sequence is as crisp as anything.

H.264 is the same family as mp4.

**timtak** · 03-12-2007, 02:40 PM

Thanks again Mark, but I am still left wondering how "Mr. Deity" gets such good quality when I am not.

This blog article recommends adjusting the bit rate to the highest that produces a video under 100MB
http://ellingtonmedia.com/blog/2007/...youtube-video/

This person is using 2000Kbs and again the "H.264," and again getting a very good result.

Both the blog and the videographer above, contra Mr Deity, recommend resizing to the YouTube size. That sounds sensible but Mr. Deity's video quality is the best I have seen.

By the way do you know which of the two Vegas AVC/ACC formats, Sony or Main Concept, comes the closes to h.264 / Youtube?

Tim

**irishmark** · 03-12-2007, 02:46 PM

I know what you mean - I forgot to mention before that when shooting with High Def the quality will always look better! - Thats a given. So I assume that Deity's footage does have that edge as its on High Def.

Its a difficult debate this as there is no realsure fire answer! It has always been the major downfall of all video community sites.

I am not too bothered myself as I dont use YouTube for my professional work. I use WMVs on our own webserver. I am gonna research this more though.

**timtak** · 03-12-2007, 03:35 PM

It seems that shooting in High Definition makes quite a difference even on Youtube.

I thought that some rendering technique would have made the difference in inputs insignificant. After all, one is throwing so much definition/quality away when uploading to Youtube, so how come my mediocre (no! quite good!) camera can't just use a less lossy rendering technique?

But here is a very short view from my window in full HD and it seems to blow my other camera out of the water.
http://ds21.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~econo/temp/test2.mp4

(The watermarks are there because I am using a demo version of Raylight to import to Vegas. )

But editing and just about everything else is a lot slower in HD and I can only record 8 minutes!

Tim