creating larger than hd file to get better quality hd on youtube?

J

Josh Bass

Veteran
I have heard this works, cant test right now and would like to see if anyone knows before I spend more time on it. Apparently some folks say you can get better hd on youtube by creating a slightly larger than hd file (2048x1152 is the example I’ve seen used). This triggers youtube to stream it at a higher bitrate than it does with actual hd material. However I am not sure it still works and believe I read it can create a worse experience for the viewer for some reason (bitrate too high for many viewers or something). Anyone tried this with success?
 
YouTube has recently increased the quality for 1080p uploads, though adding 1080p footage to a 4K/UHD timeline/sequence and sharpening slightly (sometimes adding 4K noise/grain before sharpening can also help) and rendering as 4K/UHD MXF/ProRes or similar produces the best results on YouTube, especially when the viewer can handle a 4K stream. YouTube will adapt bitrate/resolution for available bandwidth.
 
Last edited:
Imamacuser said:
Take a look at this TimeinPixels tutorial.

You might try Googl's VP9 codec as well.
Click to expand...

In PP CC you can use Lumetri sharpen or Sharpen (Effect). Unsharp Mask isn’t GPU accelerated and tends to be better suited for local contrast enhancement / LCE (using a large radius e.g 300). Adding noise/grain is especially helpful for soft 1080p (e.g. Canon full frame). For really soft footage (e.g slomo), you can do what I call Multi-Spectral Detail Enhancement, where you do LCE, unsharp mask, noise grain, and sharpen (convolution based): low, medium, and high frequency contrast enhancement.
 
Thanks. Just to be clear Im talking about projects shot and finished in HD. Any higher rez would solely be for “tricking” youtube. Ive been testing files for a few days, have tried prores and even prores hq for an hd file and YT is still beating it up pretty bad. Unless that’s YT dumbing down the stream for my (and my buddy whos been testing the files too) connection speed?
 
Try selecting 4K, as well as using Chrome if on Mac. There’s also a 1440 HD option sometimes.
 
If viewing on a mobile device you might need to use the YouTube app to get decent quality. Perhaps also try Chrome vs. Safari if on iOS.
 
Once upon a time, there were some settings and compressions/containers that if your file was in this, Youtube did nothing but pass it on to the viewer... Is this still true? Also remember that when the file says it is done processing, it is really only done with a single pass. The encoders will keep working on multiple passes in the background, so your initial upload may look different after a short amount of time.

That said, Youtube can still be found to munge a lot of work.
 
YouTube and Vimeo both do adaptive bitrate streaming. While YT works pretty well, I’ve never gotten good results from Vimeo for 4K, even with 240Mbps internet.

Good point re: initial quality. See the resolution icon lower right and make sure it says HD, 4K etc.
 
Greg_E said:
Once upon a time, there were some settings and compressions/containers that if your file was in this, Youtube did nothing but pass it on to the viewer... Is this still true? Also remember that when the file says it is done processing, it is really only done with a single pass. The encoders will keep working on multiple passes in the background, so your initial upload may look different after a short amount of time.

That said, Youtube can still be found to munge a lot of work.
Click to expand...

This is good but how do you know? It seems everything Google related is sort of secret.
 
They used to have it posted, but now it is so hard to find anything you have to wonder about it. For 1080 24/30p streams I want to say it was h.264/aac audio at 15-18 mbps in an mp4 wrapper. Kind of low but you can still get good results. With their use of VP9 as preferred codec (they made it, among others) I don't know how this holds today.
 
Yes. I recently went digging about copyright stuff and it took a while to find what I was looking for. The overall YT experience has improved a lot though. We are considering their TV service after the last cable bill price hike.
 
Looks like handbrake can do vp9 encoding so I will try that. I have done h264 at 30mbps and still bad. Weird thing is an h264 I exported from fcpx using the master file/apple devices/for computers setting came out much better than ones encoded in handbrake or any other program I tried. But still not great.
 
30mbps will force youtube to re-encode the file at the same resolution. What you need to find is the codec, bit rate, and maybe wrapper that allows the content to be used without re-encoding. And for 1080 the 15 to 18 mbps range seems about right. But again this may be old info, I haven't looked critically at anything I've uploaded, and most of that is low motion content.
 
No mention here of the addition of noise/grain.

Lets assume YT recompresses everything. Compression (very) basically looks for pixels near each other that are close in colour and lumps them into a block together saving data and creating a block of solid colour that us video people find unapealling. Cat video watchers dont mind a few blocks.

Grain will make each pixel quite different to the ones close to it - making it harder for the compression to convert the image into a bunch of blocks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top