Rizyan
Member
Hello-
I am new to editing and I just installed Premiere CS3 last week. I am happy with my videos so far, however when I attempt to upload them to Facebook and/or YouTube, the visual quality decreases significantly.
I have experimented with various exporting options and settings however none seem to fix these issues.
Can any of you give me any advice?
Thanks,
Ryan
uploading videos to youtube and sites related to youtube cause the video to look crappy. You sacrifice quality for accessibility. What you want to do is find the right balance between bit rate/quality and file size. Increasing the bit rate increases the quality, but also the files size. So when you compress for sites like youtube, you want to have the highest bit rate possible without going over the files size limit.
Once you at satisfied with your new file of compressed video, upload it to youtube (or another video site). From there they take the video and compress it even more. You have no control over what they do. The best thing to do is follow through on what i mentioned in the above paragraph.
When I export for sites like youtube, I often make the resolution 640X480 rather than 320X240. Resolution doesn't impact the file size as much as bite rate does. And if you ever worked in photoshop, you may have noticed that when you take an image and shrink it down, it's a little bit better looking. Not a lot, just a bit though...
I'm curious about your current upload practices. You do know that YouTube has only a time limitation, right? You have the ability to do both batch uploads and unlimited file size, but no video can be longer than ten minutes. Of course the time limitation provides a sort of file size cap, e.g. for SD video, the standard DV25 tape recording stored as an AVI2 file works out to a bit over 1 gig for 5 minutes of video. (So the ten minute limit effectively limits SD uploads to around 2.2 gigs.) Nevertheless, you are not limited on you file size on YouTube, but you do have to use a special uploader (installed in your computer.) So let's not worry about file size so we can concentrate on image quality.
From what I've encountered, nearly all video-on-demand is converted into a Flash format (.FLV & occasionally .SFW) for web serving. I just double checked the standards on YouTube, so I know their standard bit-rate is 378 Kbps in the .FLV format of Flash. They now have a button for "High Quality" playback which doubles the bit-rate to 763 Kbps. (And, ooh does it work nice!) So the real question you're asking is what video codec & parameters provide the best conversion to Flash .FLV format. There's only several hundred codecs for video floating around and who knows what options you have available. So it would be a simple try-and-see experiment to locate the combination you find works the best for you.
But we're really going to limit the selections. Since we have no size limit, we are free of concerns about compression. We want to upload our highest quality video files. I suggest the DV standard of .AVI (the .AVI2 format.) But uploading a 2 gig file to YouTube is never a rapid process. It can take SEVERAL HOURS. And there are no predictions offered. Keep in mind, this has nothing to do with your internet connection (I'm using cable broadband) and everything to do with the user volume. YouTube moves a lot of data every second of every day, so it is just the way things work. But the uploading doesn't tax your computing resources, you can do most other tasks (although I wonder if burning discs might require so many low level interrupts that it could cause the upload to error out?) You just have to keep the upload window open. So I'm cool with starting a large upload when I go to bed and letting it work through the night.
If you have concerns about the file size (& upload times,) I suggest using your MPG2 format. If you render for the highest quality file for DVD, it should still be significantly smaller. Which makes it leaps & bounds better than YouTube's playback. Then upload your test file and compare to the others. Cause if you're the dedicated type, you may want to experiment with .WMV or tinker with .MPG2 bit-rates (does sending in a file at the same bit rate as they will be displayed make a difference, 768 Kbps for "High Quality" on YouTube.) And you should certainly consider testing Quicktime files (although I've had poor experiences, possibly due to using only the free codecs) and it is possible to render to either of the Flash formats. You can try as many options as you have the energy to test.
But in the end, I'm guessing you won't find a lot of difference in the web playback between any of your source files. I've uploaded the current crop on my YouTube page (/barefootmedia) in .AVI, .WMV & .MPG2 formats and they all look decent at the 378 Kbps standard. But the ones I uploaded before discovering the upload too, I limited my file sizes so they don't have the 'High Quality" option. If you're interested in seeing what I'm saying, check out the "It's All About You!" City Council promo. It suffers greatly at the lower bit-rate due to all the simultaneous actions. But it's as good as it will get when played in "High Quality" mode. Which is more than adequate for the majority of users. (This brings up that pesky Production 101 problem, who is your audience & why are they watching?) But this graphics heavy promo illustrates the number one problem prosumers encounter. Not every video will look "good" on the internet, small details easily seen on the TV set are lost in the pixels of compression. Combine movement with B&W check patterns and you end up with a moving blob. It's really about bit-rate and dramatic shrinkage of the screen. There are numerous articles that get deep into the things that work & the things that don't. So you have to be careful in your selection of videos to post because the vast majority of users aren't going to click on the "view in High Quality" button. But if you are like me and maintain YouTube page to refer potential clients & out of state family, then you can also tell them to watch the videos in "High Quality."
How this information helps a bit. And good luck with improving your YouTube image quality.
Yea, I've heard that there is no longer a file size limit for youtube anymore, but I don't really like youtube. So I've never looked into that. I don't see much a difference in their "high quality" feature either. I'm just going to make my own website one of these days.
