Best render settings for youtube

[Kevin Camp]

to get the best image quality and the smallest file sizes, you’ll want to use a codec that utilizes temporal compression (also called interframe and p-frame or b-frame compression).

ae doesn’t do this type of compression well… to do it well the software needs to do a 2-pass, variable-bit-rate compression, one pass analyzes the footage to create compression keyframes and the second pass compresses it.

you’ll want to find a compression utility that can do a 2-pass encode with a codec like h.264, mpeg-4, flv or something along those lines for streaming (i think youtube recommends h.264, they also give a frame size just look on their site).

apple’s compressor or sorenson squeeze are two commercial utilities that can do this, but i’m sure there are many others… you’ll want to find one that will take an uncompressed .avi or lossless .mov and convert it to one of those other codecs. then when you render from ae, render as uncompressed/lossless and convert it to a streaming codec with the utility.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Filip Ghiorghi]

Here you go! 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua0zcaUe-EQ

[Kathryn Mclaren]

Hi Kevin,

I am trying to upload a high quality video to Youtube, however, once it is uploaded, it looks pixelated when viewed in full screen. I am following the process below:

1. AE composition is 1280 x 720 25fps.
2. Rendering in AE in lossless. This gives me a quicktime file after rendering, perhaps this is wrong?
3. Compressing in Adobe Media encoder to “h264 Youtube widescreen HD” with 2 passes.
4. Viewing this on my computer it looks fine, then once it is uploaded to Youtube is appears pixelated and not up to a good quality when viewed in full screen.

Any help on this would be great.

Thanks

Kathryn