Can't get decent MP4 quality for Youtube

Nick Nicolaou

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Hello everyone

I do apologize if this has come up before but I've spent the last few days trying find a solution to my problem but to no avail.

I'm trying to set up a gaming channel on Youtube and for the past few days I've been recording gameplay footage using a variety of software: OBS, Mirillis Action!, Fraps etc.

The problem I'm facing is that although the quality of these recordings is pretty good (although not *quite* as good as I would have hoped), whenever I edit and try to "render" (export) the videos, the quality is significantly lower than the original. This becomes even worse when I upload to Youtube, when the videos are barely watchable.

What I've tried so far:

Recording
* The software I'm using now (Mirillis Action!) supports capturing in AVI or MP4 formats. I tend to record in AVI since the recording seems to be in higher quality. (which makes sense since from what I read, AVI is not usually compressed, unlike MP4)
* Understandably, the AVI files have quite larger filesize, weighing at ~1GB per minute of video.

I would of course prefer not to store such large files on my hard drive if I can avoid it but the MP4 files have noticeably lower quality so I can live with the large file sizes.

I don't think there's an issue with the recording software since as I said the quality (especially in AVI) is very good.

Editing - Rendering
This is what I've spent most of my time on for the last few days. I've downloaded the latest trial versions of both Sony Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro and tried all the suggested default presets for 1080p video, including MainConcept AVC/AAC, Sony AVC/MVC (Vegas Pro) and HD 1080p, Youtube 1080p HD (Premiere Pro). I've also read Google's guidelines for uploading videos and made sure they all match and also played around with the bit rates. (Tried higher,lower, CBR, VBR (1 pass / 2 pass) but I haven't been able to get a quality video.

I tried to include a link to my latest video that I uploaded today but I got an error. If anyone wants to have a look at the video let me know how I can send it to you.

The closest I've got to getting this to work is to import the AVI file into Vegas Pro, make my edits and export in Quicktime (.mov) format using the Avid DxHD codec which was suggested on an old forum post I found. This method produces a very good quality video (especially compared to the rest of the methods I tried) but I have yet to try and upload it to Youtube and see how it looks there since it has a pretty large file size (~1.5-2 GB per minute)

Is this something I just have to deal with? Do I just have to work with the AVI files and export/upload in .mov format?

What I find very strange is every other Youtuber under the sun seems to be using the same software/settings that I'm using and their videos look a lot better than mine.

Thanks for any help
 

Lightsen

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to make my files super small I just use MPEGstreamclip to turn any .MOV or other file, into MP4 with no loss in quality (I do notice very slight colour alteration, but its honestly still super good :))
 

Nick Nicolaou

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to make my files super small I just use MPEGstreamclip to turn any .MOV or other file, into MP4 with no loss in quality (I do notice very slight colour alteration, but its honestly still super good :))
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a look at MPEGstreamclip.

I'm not sure that would fix my problem though since I uploaded a test .mov video last night (6GB for 3 minutes!) and even though the quality was great locally, it looks terrible on Youtube again.