Youtube picture quality

[Juc1]

Dear all,

I have a 20 minute film taken with a Sony DCR-HC53E Mini DV Handycam. I captured it as raw AVI = about 5 GB. Looks fine (nice and sharp) on the camcorder screen and in windows media player etc. I wanted to upload it to youtube so first converted it to divx then uploaded. I was surprised about how bad the picture quality on youtube was, so I captured 4 minutes of raw AVI and uploaded this – just under the youtube maximum of 1GB. It took about 12 hours to upload and the bizarre thing is the picture quality on youtube is still appalling –and there is no noticeable improvement to the divx version.
Obviously I expect some loss of quality when uploading to youtube but surely not this much - it looks like it was taken with a mobile phone.
Any suggestions please...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mFvcb6a_ZoM

[cd090580]

You won't get quality from these crappy websites.

Dailymotion, Youtube or any other flv format provider will give crappy results.

Youtube is just good for mobile phones videos. The rest is pure crap.

[minidv2dvd]

your captured DVavi is 480i. youtube will only convert that to it's standard low quality flv. in order to get youtube to make HQ or HD versions, you will have to convert to their new standards for uploads. 480p to 720i can get HQ, above 720p for HD. try converting to 720x480p h264 mp4 with aac audio with a 2-pass vbr bitrate of about 5mbps. the filesize will be larger than with divx but if you cut the video up in 5 minute segments it should be below yt's limit. that should get you the HQ version which has an acceptable picture.

[Soopafresh]

It looks pretty good with the "High Quality" link chosen. Your video would have looked much, much better had the camera been placed on a tripod while shooting. Flash doesn't like jumpy movement and the encoding quality suffers as a result.

[Juc1]

Thanks to all for replies...

It looks pretty good with the "High Quality" link chosen.

Yeah it looks ok in high quality, I didn't even know about the normal / high quality thing. I wish those dumbasses at youtube would make high quality the default for everyone. I don't think I can force my vids to load in high quality, so people could be watching in 'normal' (ie crap) quality, not knowing there is an option.

Your video would have looked much, much better had the camera been placed on a tripod while shooting. Flash doesn't like jumpy movement and the encoding quality suffers as a result.

Yeah thanks, tripod is top of my wishlist

[Juc1]

your captured DVavi is 480i. youtube will only convert that to it's standard low quality flv. in order to get youtube to make HQ or HD versions, you will have to convert to their new standards for uploads. 480p to 720i can get HQ, above 720p for HD. try converting to 720x480p h264 mp4 with aac audio with a 2-pass vbr bitrate of about 5mbps. the filesize will be larger than with divx but if you cut the video up in 5 minute segments it should be below yt's limit. that should get you the HQ version which has an acceptable picture.

I converted the raw avi to mp4 with Pinnacle Studio 12. I think that Raw AVI, Divx and mp4 seem all roughly the same picture quality when watched in youtube 'high quality', I am not sure yet which is the least jerky.

[Soopafresh]

You can link to your HQ video by using &fmt=18


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFvcb6a_ZoM&fmt=18