Issue with YouTube uploads

[digidanshow]

Greetings, I've been working on making some editorial type videos for YouTube much like a video version of a newspaper op-ed cartoon. The videos consist of a series of static black and white (grayscale) images with vocals, background music, effects, etc. Each image may be from 3 to 10 seconds long before transitioning to the next. I'm using an old version of Vegas Pro 8 for the editing and have been rendering to MPEG-2. All looks fine on Windows Media Player when played but there are some real issues when uploaded to YouTube. The images either start distorted and suddenly clear... or vise versa. I thought it may be the MPEG-2 so I uploaded a short test using an uncompressed .avi and got the same results. Since I really have no idea why this is occurring I've tried several "fixes". I've tried adding a small amount of video noise to each image and this only made matters worse... until I went back and added a small amount of blur... this seemed to help a little on some images, but not really. Perhaps the way YouTube compresses the videos it has problems with static... or static grayscale images. I'm at a loss!! I've worked very hard for several months putting this together and hate to throw my hands up now but I refuse to post something that simply looks BAD... or unprofessional. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks digi Oh, and I'll reload a video (deleted the trash) for anyone who might can figure this out.

Here's the reloaded link...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B76bRJSP7Os&feature=youtu.be

[october262]

try changing the video quality to auto and see if that helps.

[poisondeathray]

It looks like typical YT compression . There is "keyframe" popping when an I frame comes . The difference is the quality between frame types - what you see as "suddenly clear" or "suddenly distorted".

If you want it to look better...don't use YT. There is not much you can do about their compression settings, and both VP9 and AVC versions are affected. This is normal for YT, it doesn't just affect you

[digidanshow]

Thanks for the replies so far. So... this type distortion is just more noticeable with a static image and hidden with moving images? As far as not using YouTube is concerned, that negates my whole reason for making the videos... to share my insanity.

[poisondeathray]

Yes, it tends to be more noticable with still images, but you can see it occur with other types of video on YT as well. The underlying reason is the long GOP compression , insufficient bitrate.

It's unfortunate, but I don't think it should "negate" the reason for making a video, regardless of your motivations. It's distracting, but people are used to these YT issues. It doesn't stop people from posting videos to YT

Does it have to be shared on YT ? There are other hosts eg. Vimeo . I know the "pro" account gets better quality videos - from higher bitrates and encoding settings

[digidanshow]

I gave up on the expense of cable years ago and now just use YouTube channels for my limited news and other streaming services for entertainment. So I do watch a lot of YouTube videos and have never noticed this effect before. I went and watched a few videos that contained static images (The History Guy) and noticed that they always used a "moving" or panning effect with all their static photos. The nature of what I'm doing would make this "fix" extremely time consuming since I'm using so many images. Oh well, I guess some ideas just don't fit that media.

[digidanshow]

Just signed up for the free membership at VIMEO and uploaded the video. 99.5 percent of all issues were gone!!! It's certainly not the established platform of YouTube but the quality is certainly there. I'll probably sign up for the limited paid plan just to help support the effort. Thanks

[abolibibelot]

What happens if you render as MP4 at a high enough bitrate, or as a lossless intermediate then compressed with x264 (or ffmpeg + libx264) as MP4, and upload that on YouTube ?
Also, what is the resolution of the rendered files ? Quoting “poisondeathray” from December 2018 :

{my Q} Last time I checked, YouTube didn't propose a resolution of 640x480 for uploaded videos having even a slightly lower resolution than that. Is it still the case ? If so, does it make sense to resize to 640x480 before uploading, i.e. will it improve the visual quality ? And is LanczosResize a wise choice for that type of material ? (Needless to say, I don't have access to the source DVDs, which were never released in France as far as I know...)
{his A} YT is one of the few cases where upscaling to at least "HD" 720 height is beneficial . It allocates more bitrate in proportion, and even the sd version of hd, looks better than the sd version

But I checked with youtube-dl, the test video above is in 1280x720, so that part is irrelevant.
Another possible caveat : is the MPEG-2 encoding progressive or interlaced ? If interlaced, it might increase the odds of wonkiness (for no legitimate reason in this case).