What are the best export settings for Youtube and Vimeo?

[Danny Hays]

They’re both going to recompress it so to bypass a comprssion render, send the best quality video you can make to fit in the file file size and lenght you can. Other wise use Sony AVC, internet in the same resoulution as your source footage.

[Petr Berger]

i see, but youtube and vimeo recommends h264 codec in mp4 format…
is there some difference between manconcept AVC and sony AVC?

[Danny Hays]

Vegas doesn’t render to H264. I just rendered a sample as Sony AVC mp4 and main concept AVC mp4, both 1920×1080 10mbps bitrate and the main had sync isues where the sony played fine. both were almost the same in file size. If you download a video from You Tube, the higher quality ones are mp4. But even if you upload an mp4 they will still re-encode it. I believe they prefer mp4 since the quality can be good and the file size small, which makes for faster uploads.
Bottom line is the better quality you upload, the better your video will look.

[John Rofrano]

[Danny Hays] “Vegas doesn’t render to H264”

I think you mean that Vegas can’t render h.264 to a QuickTime MOV file but the Sony AVC and MainConcept AVC codecs are both AVC/H.264 so vegas absolutely does render to h.264 as an MP4 file.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[Petr Berger] “is there some difference between manconcept AVC and sony AVC?”

The MainConcept AVC codec is capable of two pass VBR encoding and so it’s probably better at very low bit-rates. It only supports Baseline and Main profile. The Sony AVC codec is CBR only, but it supports Baseline, Main, and High profiles (high profile is required for AVCHD).

Both are h.264 and you can use either for YouTube but the Sony AVC encoder has YouTube templates (they all start with “Internet xxx”) so you might as well use them. I find the Sony AVC Internet 1280×720-30p template does a real nice job when uploaded to YouTube.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Danny Hays]

I didn’t know that about Vegas making H264. Thanks John.

[Scott Mitchell]

When I use MediaInfo on a Sony AVC file, it shows it as “Variable” instead of “Constant.”

To make things worse, while the “bit rate” is close to what I set for the render (I set 4,000 Kbps and Media info shows 3,367 Kbps), the “Maximum bit rate” is large (16Mbps).

Anyone else getting this result?

[Scott Mitchell]

In fact, check this out. Using Sony AVC. Selected Main Profile and Constant 4,000,000 bps. Here is my MediaInfo.

It notes High Profile (High@L4.0) and the bitrate is Variable.

Video
ID : 2
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.0
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Format settings, GOP : M=2, N=15
Muxing mode : Container profile=Main@3.1
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 26s 26ms
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 3 406 Kbps
Maximum bit rate : 16.0 Mbps
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.123
Stream size : 10.6 MiB (93%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2011-04-21 23:33:52
Tagged date : UTC 2011-04-21 23:33:52

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Mitchell] “When I use MediaInfo on a Sony AVC file, it shows it as “Variable” instead of “Constant.” “

That’s very interesting and I did a few test renders to prove that it’s true. I performed two render tests on both MainConcept AVC and Sony AVC and Sony AVC is definitely using VBR.

So here’s what I did: I rendered 30 seconds of black and 30 seconds of a test pattern through MainConcept AVC as CBR and both files were the exact same size as you would expect because CBR uses the same amount of bits for every frame regardless of whether you need them or not.

I then preformed the same test with Sony AVC and the two files were extremely different sizes (500KB vs 4,000KB). This proves that Sony AVC is using a variable bit-rate just like MediaInfo is reporting.

Of course, nowhere on the Sony GUI does it actually say that it’s using CBR… we all just assumed that since we can only set one bit-rate that it was CBR, but as you have seen, the bit-rate is really the average for a VBR with a max of 16Mbps.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Sieber]

Jumping in a little late here, but I have a further question about the bitrates used…

I’ve been using the Sony AVC render, with the internet 1080p template – it’s default bitrate is 16Mbps… Are you saying that is the max bitrate, but Vegas will encode at a variable rate? I’ve been using this setting and have what seem like overly huge resultant files. With the intent of upload to youtube/vimeo, is that setting overkill? And for archiving – would that default rate be a good choice to archive the work?

http://www.johnsieber.com