Youtube minidv footage looks poor and blocky

[John Rofrano]

[Aleksey Tarasov] “Could you share your original clip for testing?”

Yea, I don’t understand why this looks so bad. I only publish to YouTube in 1280×720 but I would have thought that any 16:9 format would fill the video but you have black bars all around which is kinda strange considering you are rendering 16:9. Maybe one of us can play with it and see what’s going on.

~jr

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

[Alex Kye]

Thanks I really appreciate your help, Here is the some raw footage for testing 1406_hvarc3.avi.zip

It is not the exact same one as the file size is too large for my slow internet but it is from the same shoot and the subject.

[John Rofrano]

[Alex Kye] “Thanks I really appreciate your help, Here is the some raw footage for testing 1406_hvarc3.avi.zip”

That footage is *extremely* noisy and this is what’s causing your problem. You are comparing it to footage on YouTube that’s shot in good light with the same camera. Go outside and record some footage in the daylight with that camera and then send it to YouTube it will probably look fine.

All of the noise in the black part of you footage is driving the encoder crazy and causing the blocks. You can try using a denoiser but I would just shoot the original footage with better light. It would also help if you held the camera steady (i.e., buy a tripod). The encoder not only has to deal with the noise but it has to deal with your constant moving of the camera. This makes for a very difficult encode to a low bit-rate format.

~jr

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

[Alex Kye]

But when I render the footage out to a .MP4 and view it on my computer it looks crisp and fine, it is just when I upload it to youtube the video becomes blocky (I have uploaded footage before taken in daylight that also had the same problem).

[John Rofrano]

Hmmm… so that points to something about how you are uploading to YouTube. I only upload 720p media so I don’t have any experience with smaller formats on YouTube. Maybe try rendering 640×360 to get 16:9 that doesn’t exceed the 640 width and perhaps YouTube will handle it better? Also try the MainConcept AVC codec and see if that gives any better compatibility with YouTube.

~jr

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

[Alex Kye]

It appears that it was a youtube problem all along as the video looks fine on vimeo.

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High voltage arc from Alex on Vimeo.

My theory is that youtube has started to give SD video a lower bit-rate, hence 1280×720 video looking much better as it allows for a higher bit rate.

I came across this thread on youtube of people experiencing similar problems https://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=3261e6e60e29f228&hl=en

[John Rofrano]

Good to know… Thanks for getting back to us on this. I’ve never used SD media on YouTube and after reading this, I probably never will. 😉

~jr

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

[Alex Kye]

I have made another discovery, If I view the videos using youtube HTML5 ( https://www.youtube.com/html5 ) they look fine!

I am going to try and talk to someone youtube/google about this as it seems very odd that the default adobe flash player encoding causes such quality degradation.

Alex.

[Alex Kye]

I mean the video still does not look as good as vimeo in html5 but the main pixelation and blocking is not there.

[John Rofrano]

Interesting. It amazes me that YouTube quality is so much of a mystery. It should be more consistent.

~jr

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