Okay jareds tech talk of the day coming up, hope you can wrap your mind around this because this is HIGHLY advanced editing talk (not the words but the concept) but here goes:
.mp4 is a simple conversion rate. What does that nonsense mean? well it means that it takes your video and force compresses it into a reasonable size without "sacrificing" quality. Now, you might read that and be like YES! thats what i want, but read on because the word "sacrifice" is used very lightly in the definition. The .mp4 creates keyframes of the video between certain points. A key frame is the data that makes the video move and let you see what you see. Basically it says at this moment in time you were there then 5 seconds later you were there. Now your camera makes keyframes every single frame, otherwise it would be choppy and blocky and wouldn't hold the quality of the video.
BUT, .mp4 recreates the original video and puts keyframes in predetermined locations. This means that the in the middle of the keyframes is a little worse quality (bear with me now) so this file extension says, okay every few seconds the quality gets even better for that key frame moment so in order to keep a constant bitrate in your movie, it synchs the entire quality into a lower quality. ( so don't go into yuor video and try to find where it "put" the keyframes lol)
So the quality of your original definitely is better than the end result. To better understand your problem, take a warm homemade cookie, really good right? now crush it in your hands and as the warm drippy chocolate drops to the floor, you have your .mp4 file because it is now "compressed" and you lost some of the quality (the appearance and the chocolate that fell to the floor)
As of right now there is no way to convert a file from .mp4 or mpeg4 to anything else and get your quality back, because new formats are gonna take what .mp4 has and change that. So my recommendation is to either use to share to youtube feature and click on the highest settings possible or you can try exporting using a complex format, but please be warned, the export times will be much more than what your most likely used to.
Well guys that wraps up Jareds Tech Talk, stay tuned for more episodes
