Youtube and BlackMagic (Render Settings)

[fonebone10]

Hi everyone can someone help me to get good HD render settings for Youtube? I record compressed MJPEG with a BlackMagic Intensity Pro, via HDMI. I would like my quality to look somewhat like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiNaCXEmpO8

Please ignore the guy's commentary, just looking for some render settings/color correction if possible :)

[Blue_MiSfit]

Encode using x264, using CRF mode. YouTube will transcode whatever you upload, but if you give them a high quality source they will do a reasonably good job.

~MiSfit

[fonebone10]

Could you elaborate on that? Sorry, video noob...

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Could you elaborate on that? Sorry, video noob...

He means that whatever you upload to Youtube, they will always re-encode your video. They never show your video as-is. And it seems there is no way to avoid that.

So all you can do is providing a high quality clip, so Youtube has the best possible source to encode from.

And your best choice to encode a video to high quality is using x264 in CRF mode. Use something like CRF=18 or even CRF=16 and you should be fine...

[fonebone10]

How should I do this in meGUI? I can only find VBR.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

How should I do this in meGUI?

MeGUI is only one x264 GUI out of many and probably not the most noob-friendly one. There are many alternatives:
http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?f=78

And if you aren't afraid of using a commandline tool, you can do it easily with a command like this:
x264.exe --preset slower --tune film --crf 18 --output "C:\Some Folder\Output.mkv" "C:\Some Folder\Input.foo"


I can only find VBR.

VBR, whatever that is supposed to mean, is wrong! You want CRF (Constant Rate Factor) mode for this purpose ;)

[dstln]

A couple things I've noticed.

If you encode 30 fps, they change to 29.97. If you encode to 29.97, they change to 30 :P The most important thing is to get your video up to 720p (well, 720 pixels tall). Otherwise it won't flag as hd and will only use poor quality baseline encoding. I'd say also try to get it to the resolution you want if possible. Seems to end up best if you use a 1920x1080 source for example vs a 1920x1200. It doesn't seem amazing at scaling. And yeah, besides that, just make the temp file (the one you're uploading) as transparent as possible while still not causing too many headaches to upload. crf 16 is pretty good and easy for this.

Honestly your sample isn't bad for youtube quality. There isn't TOO much you can do. Their bitrates just aren't high enough to manage heavy motion/heavy detail all that well so it falls apart a bit during those parts.

[fonebone10]

No, the sample is what I would like my quality to be. At any rate, I'm using tips from the guy a post above you, and I will post results.

[me7]

The most important thing is to get your video up to 720p (well, 720 pixels wide).

I guess you mean 1280 pixels wide?

[dstln]

actually no, I meant 720 height lol

[fonebone10]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdJpkkNEmYs

Finished Quality

Suggestions on how to improve?

[Terranigma]

Does youtube allow x264 in lossless? If so, i'd suggest you encode to a lossless x264 file by only using --qp 0 and then up it.

[fonebone10]

Sorry, could you please explain how to do that?

[RunningSkittle]

x264 <input> --qp 0 --output <output>

read the help file....

[Boolsheet]

Does youtube allow x264 in lossless?
It's allowed but the ouput is broken (or could be considered art ;) ). They're using libavcodec, right? How long is high 4:4:4 predictive now in there, like over a year? That's sad.
I know Vimeo updated theirs, but they don't accept gaming videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdJpkkNEmYs
Looks really smooth for 24 fps, I like it.
And regarding the quality, well... Holding the camera steady in this game is probably not an option. ;)

[Warperus]

fonebone10
Do not do encoding at all as soon as your video file is less than 2Gb in size. Just upload it as is.
If you have to... make your file as big as possible to preserve quality. You can use coding with --bitrate 25000.

As for color settings I suspect your uploaded video lacks some dark colors. Take a close look at first seconds of your video. Does it look so pitch black in game (black shadows in first cave)?

[me7]

actually no, I meant 720 height lol

Does this mean that a 1280x680 video is not treated as "HD"?

[AlekseiV]

Does this mean that a 1280x680 video is not treated as "HD"?I've uploaded 1024x768 videos to YouTube and it processed them as 720p HD. Not sure if it resized them or not, didn't bother to check.

[Boolsheet]

Does youtube allow x264 in lossless?
It looks like they actually updated their decoder and can properly decode it now. Too bad that they throw the deinterlacer at progressive H.264 streams as mentioned in the other (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156395) thread.