HELP - Having a lot of trouble uploading same quality to YT

[jordan.bourne13]

I've researched this for hours now, and tried multiple things, but nothing seems to be working. I've edited my video using Final Cut, then exported it as a .mov file. Being a very large file there (3-4 gigs) I downloaded the program Hand Brake and compressed it. I used all of YouTube's recommended upload settings (H264, MP4, etc), and tried multiple variables around already. Regardless, it results in a slight decrease in quality and HUGE decrease in file size -- which is great.

My issue is that this file, when then uploaded to Youtube (or Vimeo for that matter) gets compressed again for some unknown reason, perhaps just by default, to the point where in the Youtube hosted version the colours have slightly changed, things look less sharp and one effects shot looks way less sharp and much more muddled than even the Hand Brake compressed file on my desktop.

Can anyone help me with this? How are there some videos on Youtube that are just CRYSTAL clear (see any modern music video, Ed Sheeran, Eminem, Ghost, whatever) and then despite following all recommended settings Youtube won't put a version of mine that is accurate to the one I try to upload. The compressed file is about 140 MB by the way. Do certain uploaders pay some sort of premium to Youtube to be able to upload their videos in great quality (music videos, movie trailers, etc) or am I just doing something terribly wrong despite going over it a hundred time and following 'the rules'?

EDIT: I do have links to images and to the video to provide examples, but this forum won't let me post them so I'll try to work around that by separating the link text...

Here is an image of the original, uncompressed file: tinypic.com/r/20z5qar/9

Here is an image of the Handbrake compressed file (all done to Youtube upload recommendations): tinypic.com/r/8yztbp/9

Here is an image of the video itself as hosted by Youtube (played in the 1080P setting): tinypic.com/r/t0gi8p/9

And here is a link to the video itself: youtube.com/watch?v=JZDeDU9he0o

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks

 

[KatyAdelson]

I moved this to the Video Editing / Software discussion forum. ^_^

When you export from FCPX, are you selecting Video Codec: H.264 in the "Settings?" I don't think a 3 minute video should be over a gigabyte with H.264 unless there's some serious editing going on (as in tons of green screen, keying, key-framing, lots and lots of HD layers...and even then 1 gig is kind of too big. Maybe if it were 4K??)... It could be you are exporting from FCPX under extremely high quality, and then trying to compress it afterwards -- but perhaps something goes awry with that and YouTube compresses it again. If you export as H.264 in FCPX, then maybe you'll have a tiny bit more control over the quality when it uploads to YouTube. ^_^

It also takes YouTube a bit of time to display a video at its full quality after being uploaded. I'd check it again after an hour or so of being uploaded to see if the quality improved.