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Sony Vegas Platinum 12 settings for YouTube
I’m struggling to find the right render settings for YouTube.
I’m using Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 and, as far as I can tell MainConcept AAC/AVC is the best format for the internet.
Here are my current settings:
I’m doing fast paced video game footage, sometimes 30 minutes long. My upload speed is usually right under 5mbps so I’m fine with a 30 minute video being a couple GB.
To better explain the content of my video: in the center is the game (first person shooter, very fast movement) with a static border I’ve created that has some text on it. I also have webcam footage on the side. VBR doesn’t seem ideal because it looks like it assesses what would look best for the majority of the frame, then the static text ends up looking worse (or the webcam video gets blocky).
Any help would be appreciated.
P.S. Would I benefit, rendering wise, from upgrading to Pro?
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8 Replies
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Your settings seem fine. Youtube recommends around 8Mbps average for 1080p30 footage. The Vegas AVC encoder is not as good as the one Youtube uses so maybe you should aim for 10Mbps average in Vegas.
VBR is fine and is the best quality. It does not care about parts of frames. What it does is try to keep an average bitrate near your setting but allowing higher bitrates on harder to encode sections and lower bitrates on easier sections. By harder is mean video sections that need a higher bitrate for a given quality. If the whole video is “harder” then you cannot get much gain.
To get the best use of VBR you want to use two pass. Only in two pass can the encoder get an idea of what parts of the video are easier and harder. VBR without two pass is not as variable as VBR with two pass.
Fast moving video needs high bitrates for better video quality. This is because the encoder cannot find as much frame to frame similarities to get better compression. The only way you can improve video like this is a higher bitrate, but since you are Youtube uploading and they are re-encoding to lower bitrates it ultimately does not do as much good. But they use x264 which is a better encoder and uploading a higher bitrate file from Vegas will help.
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Interesting. I’ll try 10mbps with two-pass. I didn’t think two-pass offered that much more quality, plus it takes almost twice as long, but I guess I’ll just have to suck it up.
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[John Abraham] ” I didn’t think two-pass offered that much more quality, plus it takes almost twice as long, but I guess I’ll just have to suck it up.
“It may improve and it may not. It all depends on the specific video you are encoding. The only thing you can say is that with MC AVC is that two pass VBR will very nearly always get the best quality. You would have to render one pass as well and compare to see it you really needed two pass or not.
If you really want the best quality, then output an intermediate format like DNXHD and use Handbrake to do your final encode. Handbrake uses the x264 AVC encoder.
Youtube always re-encodes so it is commonly quicker to just throw some extra bitrate at the Vegas encode and upload that.
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So it would probably save me time in the long run if I just render out in CBR?
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[John Abraham] “So it would probably save me time in the long run if I just render out in CBR?”
Why would you use CBR when VBR will give better quality in nearly all cases? One pass VBR should normally be better than CBR, and VBR two pass should/might be better than VBR one pass.
The real question is what bitrate settings will give you the smallest file for upload while resulting in the best Youtube quality. For that I will not try to give an answer, except that with the Vegas encoders at low bitrate you will probably want to encode a little higher than the Youtube recommendation. Hence my previous statement about trying 10Mbps average if you are not happy with 8Mbps.
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So the VBR two-pass definitely looks the best but it’s 2.18 GB. That’s pretty big but I can live with it.
I’m uploading to YouTube now to see how much they butcher it.
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So just for the hell of it, I tried rendering at 14 mbps and YouTube still butchers it. Why does this happen and why do other people seem to have perfect quality but my videos get compressed to hell?
Here are my settings:
And here is the final product uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn5oaUaPxv0&feature=youtu.be
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The previous post is mine, I just logged in with Facebook the first time and with my email the second.
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