How do I get the good upload video quality to youtube @1080p 60fps?

[algomalvado]

Hi, I'd like to upload some gaming longplays to youtube. The problem is my video quality, by the time youtube is done with, looks awful.

I tried uploading a Quake playthrough @1080p 60fps and it didn't look good at all. I recorded the video with nVidia Shadowplay, then compressed it with Handbrake following a guide I found on youtube. It looked fine after the compression on my laptop but after uploading to youtube it looked horribly lossy. I then tried experimenting with other options, including rendering with Sony Vegas (following another guide I found on YT), and uploading raw shadowplay files at 50mbps or 15mbps recording quality and none of these uploads looked good.

This guy however seems to have very nice video quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLcrZLOavZ0

That's kind of look I want, it's very clean. I asked him for help but he didn't reply. If you guys could help me attain video quality like that I'd be very grateful, thank you

[algomalvado]

Somebody recommended the following settings to me, but I don't know what the program he's using is. Any chance you recognise it? Thanks.

[pandy]

There is only one way to allocate higher bitrate for your stream - you must upscale your video to 4k resolution before upload. YT will ignore all your efforts and will recompress your video accordingly to internal settings and you can't do anything with this.
(some workaround is trying to recompress video to very similar or slightly worse quality before uploading video to YT however this mean that final quality may be even worse than proposed by YT).

For CG you should IMHO apply some antialiasing filtering and perhaps temporal (motion) blur to reduce quality degradation.

[manono]

I agree, filter it properly. You didn't link to your own video to compare with the one you showed us, so we can't offer more informed advice.

Because of the low bitrate YouTube uses, filtering to make it more compressible is necessary for videos with lots of movement. It may look worse on the computer but better on YouTube as compared to what you have now.

[algomalvado]

Thanks for your replies.

Here's the longplay I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYCA0_aynt0

As you can see it looks very lossy, especially when I pick up a quad damage power up in dark areas (for example check out the 11 minute mark). Generally the whole thing looks very lossy, but that really shows just how poor it gets. However I am wondering if maybe I'm being too harsh on the video quality -- what do you guys think?

That video btw is not using the same in-game texture filtering as the video I posted in the OP. I tried experimenting with the same in-game texture filtering to see what it would look like on youtube. This is the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCym3oIgPlI

It looks a little cleaner than the look of my longplay, but I don't think it's as clean as the video in the OP. Dunno what to do. Tried many more experiments (including uploading raw shadowplay files without compression of various bitrates and rendering with sony vegas following a youtube guide) and all results were unsatisfactory.

Here's another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYUYHvbcdHw
Look at how clean his vid looks at the 1:02 mark when he picks up the quad damage, and then compare it to the same quad damage in my longplay at 44 seconds (or in the second video which uses the same texture filter, check out the 52 second mark). Mine looks horrible in comparison.