HELP!!! MY YOUTUBE HD QUALITY SUCKS, WHY...???

[joelomatic2000]

PLEASE HELP!!



I am about to punch someone at YouTube right in the stomach. I have tried to upload 2 seperate encoded versions of a 1080p HD video to YouTube and the quality loss is astoundingly bad!



I usually use Vimeo and am used to the high quality results I get from them but this is for a crowd funder and they will only accept YouTube video links.



The footage was shot on Canon 1DC at 4K + 6D at 1080p. Am exporting a 1080p video from Adobe Premiere Pro CC v8.1.



1st export was H.264 using the 'YouTube 1080p25 preset from the Premiere drop down list of options when exporting. Bitrate 16Mbps, no changes to the standard preset settings - fail, the picture falls to bits ie. boxing, artifacting, softness.



Tried again with a H.264 with a 'match source' setting in an attempt to keep more quality + increased the bitrate to a Target Bitrate of 20Mbps & Max bitrate of 25Mbps.

I got the exact the same result.



Here's my question. Is YouTube just absolute Rubbish and should I just expect this? Or is there a way I can make this work better like other videos I've seen on YouTube? Honestly I've seen smoother 640p videos on YouTube than this 1080p looks.



Here are some comparison images:



AFTER EXPORT FROM PREMIERE (before YouTube)

AFTER UPLOAD TO YOUTUBE (on YouTube)

* Yes I did make sure that the video had actually loaded the HD 1080p quality before I took the screen shot.



And here is the full YouTube video - search 'A Home For Devia La Lune Cinema' on YouTube



I can't imagine YouTube is this bad and I also can't imagine I'm the only person getting this problem. I used the YouTube 1080 preset for Pete's sake how wrong could I have gone..??



Anyway Any help would be VERY appreciated. I'd prefer this video to tell the story better with some decent image quality.



Cheers in advance!



Joel

 

[James Strange]

I have never uploaded to Vimeo so I can not comment on comparison. But I do lose some quality from what I export to my hard drive and what is on YouTube.

 

[joelomatic2000]

I just checked it on another computer and for some reason it seems to look alot smoother, I don't know if it's a Safari thing but I just watched it in Chrome, on my same computer, and it looks instantly smoother and better quality.

This is what I've learned recently from a number of different projects - Safari is hopeless with images/video. Have had a variety of problems lately with image quality and only in Safari. The same image or video will look better in other browsers.

 

[joelomatic2000]

Still.....I use Safari with Vimeo and it has no problem, video looks great. Perhaps this is a Google/Youtube and Apple working relationship problem?

 

[James Strange]

I use chrome on my laptop, only use safari on my phone.

 

[AMovieReference]

After a quick google search (because someone else posted a similar problem recently) it looks like at least a few years ago, youtube was auto converting 25fps footage into 30fps. So you may want to try interpreting all your footage as 24fps if possible. I know it sucks, but that's the best suggestion I can find out there :/

Just google "Youtube 25fps issues" and you should find a number of other people talking about it.