Outputting from FCP for YouTube/best practices?

[Chris Borjis]

this is what I use and it looks spectacular:

full res (hd or sd, leave it full resolution so 720×480 in your case)

video: H.264 @ 2,000 kbps

audio: AAC, @ 168kbps

You tube will downsize it good and give your video a high quality
option that will look great.

[Mark Suszko]

A correction, Youtube wants it at 640 x 480. I tried h.264 yesterday which I agree looks great, but YT rejected it as unknown format.

Their preferences according to their site are MPEG4 (DIVX or XVID) Windows AVI, Mpeg, with audio as mpeg3. Darned if I can find one of those four formats with the mp3 audio and 640 by 480 size options, all in one spot.

[Chris Borjis]

[Mark Suszko] “A correction, Youtube wants it at 640 x 480.”

yes thats right for 4:3 projects so that it properly displays
and additionally HD needs to be resized to 854×480 so that it letterboxes.

I just did one yesterday at D1 widescreen (from HD) 854×480 with the codec settings I specified,(I’ve done 5 or 6 that way) so
I’m not really sure why it wouldn’t work on your end.

[Tim O’grady]

The new maximum size for youtube videos is 1024MB (still 10 minutes). Here’s a good tutorial:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/you_tube_redux_gary.html

[Mark Suszko]

AWESOME link, thanks!

[Dennis Leppell]

I spent 2 days in compressor hell trying to figure out the best setting template for our situation (hunting/fishing tv show, so lots of busy backgrounds and camera moves). here’s what I came up with:

export FCP self contained movie.

drop this movie into compressor

video settings:

h.264
30 fps
keyframe ever 15
data rate restrict to 10,000 kb/s optimized for download
faster encode (got a new 8 core since I set this up, and am doing my first vid w/ it and compressor 3, so I may got multi-pass now)

audio settings:
AAC
Mono
44.1 kHz
best quality
128 kbps

Now for the various settings you can set inside the inspector window. These were tuned after lots of research and 40-some test vids to combat various things like soft picture, muted colors, with some compromises for encoding time.

Width: 640
Height: 480
Pixel aspect ratio: Square
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: 30
Frame Controls On:
Retiming: (Good) Frame Blending
Resize Filter: Linear Filter
Deinterlace Filter: Better (Motion Adaptive)
Adaptive Details: Off
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Progressive
Codec Type: H.264
Multi-pass: Off, frame reorder: On
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 75
Min. Spatial quality: 25
Key frame interval: 15
Temporal quality: 50
Min. temporal quality: 25
Average data rate: 10.24 (Mbps)
Brightness And Contrast
Brightness: 0.000
Contrast: 5.000
Sharpen Edge
Amount: 18.600
Color Correct Highlights
Red: 12.000
Green: 12.000
Blue: 12.000
Color Correct Midtones
Red: 12.000
Green: 12.000
Blue: 12.000
Color Correct Shadows
Red: 12.000
Green: 12.000
Blue: 12.000
Gamma Correction
Gamma: 1.100

You can set all this yourself, or here’s the easy way: download the setting here: https://rapidshare.com/files/156828008/Youtube.setting.html

See the results here (keep in mind the shakey camera/busy background causes a lot of the artifacts you’ll see):

youtube.com/watch?v=HW_pmQcrQGc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW_pmQcrQGc

I just encoded a 6 minute vid to upload, and it took 14 minutes on an 2 X 2.8 GHZ quad core w/ 2GB ram, MUCH faster than the 2 hours it took on my G5. File size is 461 GB, well under Youtube’s 1 GB limit.

If anyone has any improvements on this setting PLEASE let me know.

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[David Roth weiss]

Dennis,

Are you guys shooting with those disposable cameras they sell at Walgreens? Jeeze, no wonder you need to change so many settings in Compressor.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Dennis Leppell]

disposable, yes….but not from Walgreens. We use XL2 and (now) a Z1U. all shoulder mounted on a rocking fishing boat, makes for not the easiest source footage for compression.

Following a few guides, including Ken Stone’s, I decided that I had to be as hands on as possible to counteract the recompression that youtube will do (they took away the flash hack, grrrr). Progressive, because it’s viewed on the web. color correction because there’s no simple saturation boost setting (that i know of); youtube seems to desaturate colors a bit after uploading. Boosting the sharpness to counteract it looking soft what they’re done with it. Contrast and gamma to keep from looking washed out. Frame controls were specifically to help with deinterlacing and motion of a constantly moving camera.

The whole process leaves a video that doesn’t look all that good when played back on the computer, but is fairly decent once recompressed by youtube.

Yea, our footage is about the worst you can use for compressing for the web; this was my attempt to make it look passable on youtube, and compared to stock settings from youtube, it looks drastically better.

[David Roth weiss]

I was joking with you Dennis and I commend you for putting up with my humor.

On a more serious note, web compression is a black art, and it can take ages to find tried and true solutions that work beautifully. Of course it does help to have perfect video from the start, and that is unfortunately all too rare these days, as anyone who owns a camera can call themselves a professional cameraperson.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.