Struggling with YouTube's encode, what export settings should I use?

[Henrik]

Hi!

Just purchased Dxtory, love it so far! I recorded Rocket League using UtVideo YUV420 BT.709 VCM at 60 fps. I edited in Premiere Pro CC 2015 and exported with a variety of settings, including target and max bitrate 16, 2-pass and ticket max on everything (also tried lots of variations and lots of bitrates). h264 with the YouTube 1080p HD preset. No matter what I do the colours fade and the picture blurs a bit, as if the bitrate was too low.

I know this is meant to work as it looks amazing in Premiere Pro, and TotalBiscuit's footage with the same codec and software looks incredible. Any ideas?

Thanks!


Henrik

[chronosek]

I think Premiere Pro CC for non-yuv efects is rgb, so you have like screen (rgb) -> codec (yuv420) -> editing (rgb) -> h264 (codec probably yuv420) -> youtube (yuv420) on each step you convert colorspace not to mention losy compresion of h264 ...
I propose try record with UTVideo RGB codec, rgb have full resolution of colors, it will need more space and transfer but should help a bit (would be like rgb->rgb->rgb->yuv420->yuv420) and try set option in premiere to render on maximum depth too to lose less color information...
You should always try send best quality footage, cause will be less artifacts... if this color degradation is on YouTube part, then you can almost nothing do, i do not know how to prepare special for youtube but you have to remeber that your footage is re-encoded by YouTube, so no matter how high bitrate you put it will always be reencoded to their bitrate, maybe some denoising or temporal filters would help compress better for youtube, cause it would help on low bitrate compression.
For h264 settings - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

[aznricepuff]

Like chronosek said, youtube transcodes all uploaded videos, so there is a hard limit on how good you can make your videos look on youtube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Quality_and_formats - if you want to see the approximate bitrates youtube's own encoders target).

The color shift you are noticing is because youtube's html5 player is bugged and always uses bt601 coefficients when doing yuv->rgb conversion for playback, when all hd content should be (and in your case, is) using the rec709 colorspace and the associated bt709 coefficients. Interestingly, the problem does not exist for the old flash player. Until the devs at youtube decide to fix this, there's nothing we can do. If you are desperate for correct colors, you can convert your videos into the rec601 space before uploading them to youtube, keeping in mind that if/when the issue gets fixed on youtube's end, those videos will then playback with incorrect colors.

More info on the improper color management issues here: http://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?threads/youtubes-color-space.3614/page-2

[DrunkMonk74]

Hi!

Just purchased Dxtory, love it so far! I recorded Rocket League using UtVideo YUV420 BT.709 VCM at 60 fps. I edited in Premiere Pro CC 2015 and exported with a variety of settings, including target and max bitrate 16, 2-pass and ticket max on everything (also tried lots of variations and lots of bitrates). h264 with the YouTube 1080p HD preset. No matter what I do the colours fade and the picture blurs a bit, as if the bitrate was too low.

I know this is meant to work as it looks amazing in Premiere Pro, and TotalBiscuit's footage with the same codec and software looks incredible. Any ideas?

Thanks!


Henrik

Hey dude

So I was having similar issues as yourself recording and uploading to YT and I use Prem Pro CC 2015 too. So how I resolved this is using the following settings and software. I cannot take credit for this. On these forums someone else gave me this tip. I've tried to find the thread to credit them, but I cannot find it any more, so apologies to whoever it was that suggested the following.

First your recording codec for Dxtory. I now use Magic YUV which can be downloaded from here : http://magicyuv.com/index.php/download/magicyuv  The latest version is 1.2, but this is now a "pay what you think it's worth" version. If you want a free full version download 1.1, but it's a great codec, so if you can, donate to the developer and download 1.2.

Next your settings for Dxtrory. I was trying to upload 1440p 60fps footage and it was coming out horrible. This was largely down to the bitrate. More successful YouTube'rs will have a higher bitrate allowance than the rest of us. However there are some standard bitrate settings for YT for everyone. A 1080p vid has a lower bit rate allowance than a 1440p vid. Someone on here suggested that I change my Dxtory settings so I'm recording at 2048x1152. If you record at this level and export from Prem Pro at this size, when you upload to YT, it'll only show as a 1080p vid, but will have the higher bitrate allowance of a 1440p vid.

My Dxtory and Magic YUV settings are attached. After that it's just your Prem Pro export settings you need to worry about. Again attached are my Prem Pro settings. I use the H264 format, within that I chose the YouTube 1080p HD preset and then adjusted to the settings I've attached.

The final uploaded vid to YT looks like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_82LeiyMhr4

Hope this helps.

EDIT - Download and install Dxtory version 2.0.128. This is far and away still the best version to use in terms of write speeds, next to zero in game FPS hit and quality of recording. I'm on Win 10 64bit and any version after 2.0.128 is just horrible for me.