Best settings for vegas pro 8.1 and youtube.

[ingeborgdot]

I tried some settings I found on google to try and give me a better picture on youtube but it actually made it worse. Any ideas on what the best settings are for a SD picture to put on youtube? Thanks.

[aedipuss]

for sd material it's often best just to upload your source. they will take files up to 1gb in size and 10 minutes long.

if you want the video to show up with a HD link and the higher quality you will have to upsize it to at least 1280x720p with at least 4-5mbps bitrate.

so what is the source material? what format and bitrate?

[ingeborgdot]

SD avi format. Will it accept avi? 3 minutes long?

[aedipuss]

avi is a general term for a "audio video interleaved" file. what type of avi? uncompressed? DVavi? divx? xvid? mkv? what bitrate? file size? audio type and bitrate?

yt mostly wants people to upload mp4 with aac audio. vegas has the mainconcept mp4 encoder and the sony avchd encoder. either should work to make mp4 with aac. if not use handbrake or any of the other x264 front end guis. make the bitrate high enough to create a nice smooth video. 4-5 mbps should normally be enough but i go as high as 10mbps for some videos.

[ingeborgdot]

How do I tell for sure? I put it in mediainfo and here is what I got.
General
Complete name
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 770 MiB
Duration : 3mn 32s
Overall bit rate : 30.4 Mbps
Movie name :
Director :
Encoded by :
Recorded date : 2009-11-25 21:47:33

Video
ID : 0
Format : Digital Video
Codec ID : dvsd
Codec ID/Hint : Sony
Duration : 3mn 32s
Bit rate : 28.8 Mbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 1.500
Original display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Standard : NTSC
Resolution : 24 bits
Colorimetry : 4:1:1
Scan type : Interlaced
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 2.778
Stream size : 729 MiB (95%)

Audio
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Unsigned
Codec ID : 1
Codec ID/Hint : Microsoft
Duration : 3mn 32s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 536 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Stream size : 38.9 MiB (5%)
Interleave, duration : 267 ms (7.99 video frames)
Interleave, preload duration : 266 ms

[lordsmurf]

Create AVI in VirtualDub first (deinterlace, filter), then use Vegas to encode it.

[ingeborgdot]

My ignorance is going to show. I have not used virtual dub. How would I do what you are telling me to do. The video clip has been rendered to what I have showed you to try and not compress any of it. The clip is around 771mb and when I use any other program it compresses it down to around 230mb. I am just looking to see what settings are best in Vegas pro. Thanks.

[ingeborgdot]

I have the raw footage in my vegas pro all set up and ready to render. I am going to continue to google I guess to find someone that has the settings I think look best.

[poisondeathray]

What have you tried so far?

You will get better results with other programs , as lordsmurf suggested. Vegas has a very low quality deinterlacer, and depending on how noisy your footage is, you may want to denoise it a bit.

The best you can do with vegas is deinterlace (either blend or interpolate modes suck) and use h.264/aac as aedipuss suggested

When youtube re-encodes it , it will drop the quality even more

[ingeborgdot]

When you say better results with other programs what do you mean by results? Finished product? Is there a progam that has a better deinterlacer than vegas?
He suggested virtualdub. How do I use it? What would my steps be? Man you guys are really making me feel stupid.
I spent some good money on Vegas Pro and now you say it has a low quality deinterlacer! Crap.
Would anyone of you be willing to help a poor old sap like myself and give me a little of your wealth of knowledge on how and what to do with the programs I have? Thanks so much for the insight so far.

[poisondeathray]

NO; vegas is fine for what it's supposed to do - editing, but no program is perfect , they all have pros/cons. It just happens that vegas has a low qualilty deinterlacer.

Can you be more specific about what you don't like about the vegas export? Are you judging the quality based on youtube or the vegas export? It might be something else that you are doing wrong, or some setting. Also youtube makes everything look bad. It uses a very low bitrate, so even if you upload a masterpiece with a high bitrate, it ends up looking like crap.

You will definitely get better results using an avisynth deinterlacer, but a bit of a learning curve...It depends how much you want to learn...and how much work you are willing to do. You're going to have to do some reading, because there's too much to cover in a single post...

If you had lots of edits in vegas, I would export a lossless intermediate (e.g. lagarith), or uncompressed, then process that with avisynth. Or you could deinterlace your footage then import that in to vegas - this usually gives better results, because any overlays, titles, effects, etc... look better when they are placed on progressive footage, rather than put on interlaced, then deinterlaced at a later stage. If you only had simple edits, I would skip vegas alltogether

[ingeborgdot]

Quality based on youtube. I see some that are pretty nice but the ones that I have tried in youtube have been so bad if you put them to full screen it is very hard to see it clearly at all.
I have all the editing done I want in vegas down to a 3 min video. It comes from a multitude of different games.

(If you had lots of edits in vegas, I would export a lossless intermediate (e.g. lagarith), or uncompressed, then process that with avisynth. Or you could deinterlace your footage then import that in to vegas - this usually gives better results, because any overlays, titles, effects, etc... look better when they are placed on progressive footage, rather than put on interlaced, then deinterlaced at a later stage.)
How do I do this?

[poisondeathray]

Your source video is standard definition. It won't look good in fullscreen mode. Period. Nothing you can do about it.

Shoot and capture HD if you want better quality. This will make WAY more difference than your choice of deinterlacer, or use of other programs. Garbage in = Garbage out = worse garbage when processed by youtube.

Compare the quality of the export from vegas played on your PC, to that of the youtube video. If you think the vegas export is pretty good, there's not much else you can do. The major problems here are standard definition, and youtube. You can slightly improve it by using avisynth, but it will still look like crap in fullscreen mode.

How do I do this?

Export lagarith intermediate from vegas ,set deinterlacing to "none" in vegas (ie. export interlaced), then use avisynth script to frameserve into an encoder. Yadifmod+nnedi2 is a good choice for deinterlacer

Your script might look like this

AVISource("vegas export.avi")
ConvertToYV12()
interp=nnedi2(field=0) #same rate, keep bottom field
yadifmod(order=0, field=-1, mode=0, edeint=interp) #BFF, field set to order, same rate

Feed the script into an encoder, e.g. ripbot264, or xvid4psp, handbrake, etc..

You're going to have to do some basic reading to fill in the knowledge gaps
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page

[poisondeathray]

Here is an illustrative example comparing the deinterlacers. These were lossless frame captures (so before lossy compression was used), so only the effect of deinterlacing is being compared.

vegas blend


vegas interpolate


yadifmod+nnedi2


In blend mode, vegas turns everything into a blurry mess to get rid of the deinterlacing artifacts. This is a better mode for internet uploads, because there will be less jaggies and noise, which means less bitrate required for a certain "quality" level.

In interpolate mode, the picture is more sharp, but vegas leave significant aliasing and jaggies. On consecutive frames, these combine to cause shimmering when played at normal speed and is very annoying. The jaggies act as noise, and you need a higher bitrate to achieve the same quality.

Avisynth has dozens of choices of deinterlacers, and many different options for each. You have the option to use a very fast lower quality one, or higher quality but slow one and anything in between. In this example, I used yadifmod+nnedi2, which is fairly slow and cpu intensive, and poorly multithreaded (more CPU cores don't help very much with scaling), but it's pretty evident which one is better here in terms of quality.

This hardly matters if you are playing fullscreen and using youtube. You need a better source and HD preferably. You can only do so much with SD.

[ingeborgdot]

Understood about HD vs SD. The video is already captured in SD and no way to change now cause we can't play the game over again. I will try some different settings to see what I can do to get it to work. Thanks for all your help and I will keep reading and trying.

[ingeborgdot]

I put my stuff on youtube and it looked like crap after it was done. I came back the next day and was probably going to delete it but played it and it looks a lot better now. What happened?

[aedipuss]

youtube makes many versions of your video. the "quick" first one is always the worst. an HD video version can take up to 12 hours to get rendered and online at yt. if you upped 720p or better adding &fmt=22 to the end of the video url will show the HD version without having to click the HD button.