YouTube Premiere Settings - High Definition Fine Tuned

[Priapism]

Ok we originally did this in another thread, but I wanted to get the settings perfect.

The following enables me to do High Definition videos in YouTube with Adobe Premier Encoder, when YouTube couldn't properly handle the raw MTS files. I have saved it as my "YouTube" preset and now I dont even have to think about it. Just pop the video in, select the preset, and push the button to encode.

Is there anything here you would adjust which you are confident WILL NOT adversely affect video quality?

(before you decide, remember that though YouTube re-encodes for a max of 2MB, the theory that "the better the video you start out with, the better it will look after YouTube is done with it" is still an important issue)

One reason I ask this is because a 1 min 50 second clip, took 2 hrs to get online:

* 1 hour to encode (480 MB file)
* 40 minutes to upload to YouTube
* 30 minutes for YouTube to process in High Definition

-------------------------------------------
SETTINGS:

1280X720
Frame Rate: 59.94 (only other options are 24 and 23.97)
Field Order: None (Progressive)
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Profile: High
Level: 4.1
VBR 2 Pass
Target Bitrate: 20 Mbps
Max Bitrate: 35 Mbps
Set Key Frame Distance: Not checked
Audio: Dolby Digital 48 KHz, Bitrate 192
Multiplexing: TS

Thanks.

-P-

[aedipuss]

you could cut some time off that if you changed a couple things. youtube uses the x264 encoder, so some things it prefers.

1280x720 30p h(x)264 - shoot for 5-6 mbps, anything more is overkill and just increases file size and upload time.

aac audio

package in a mp4 container.

[creamyhorror]

Might as well err on the side of caution and do 8-9 Mbps. Especially since you're encoding with Adobe rather than x264.

[aedipuss]

Might as well err on the side of caution and do 8-9 Mbps. Especially since you're encoding with Adobe rather than x264.

hehe - wow you don't like the crippled mc much.....

[Priapism]

1) If YouTube re-encodes at 2MB/s , why would there be any difference between encoding it at 5-6 in Premiere versus 8-9?

2) This would make "Target Bitrate" what number?

3) This would make "Max Bitrate" what number?

4) I knocked the bitrates down to 2.7 and 4, respectively, and started the encoder, just to see ... file size says it will be 75 MB as opposed to 480 MB but ... encoding time is still going to take over an hour. Why???

-P-

[aedipuss]

1 - he's making a statement against the crippleware version of mainconcept encoder in pp and vegas. it really wouldn't make all that much difference in the final youtube version.

2- make the target the middle of the high and low.

3 - max would be the higher of the numbers.

4 - the encoder has to process the same number of source frames no matter what the output bitrate is.

[creamyhorror]

Might as well err on the side of caution and do 8-9 Mbps. Especially since you're encoding with Adobe rather than x264.

hehe - wow you don't like the crippled mc much.....

1 - he's making a statement against the crippleware version of mainconcept encoder in pp and vegas.

Actually, even with x264 I'd still use 8 Mbps. If you're going to upload something, upload it with a good margin of error. 5-6Mbps strikes me as the minimum you should upload at. I do think that x264 is substantially more efficient at retaining quality than other consumer encoders, so I threw that in as a reason.

[Priapism]

2- make the target them middle of the high and low.

3 - max would be the higher of the numbers.

Wow, talk about a confusing way of putting it. Couldn't just give numbers?

Is this right if im shooting for "8 to 9 Mbps" ?

Target - 8.5 (halfway between 8 and 9)
Max - 9 (the max)

the encoder has to process the same number of source frames no matter what the output bitrate is.

So its reasonable for a 1 minute 50 second clip to take over an hour to encode???

Cream - question - i remember people mentioning that if I "deinterlaced" these Premiere files after encoding, that I could improve quality exponentially. Will that improvement carry over onto youtube at all, given their re-encoding and limitations?

PS ... here is the 1 min 50 second video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMu5ZwrRj4s&fmt=22 -- This is the version encoded at 30 Mbps. Never bothered to do the 8 or 9 one because it was goin to take another hour to encode. Quality isnt too bad I suppose, but I feel like it could be better.
-P-

[creamyhorror]

So its reasonable for a 1 minute 50 second clip to take over an hour to encode???

That's really too slow. It could be because you're using an extremely high bitrate.

Cream - question - i remember people mentioning that if I "deinterlaced" these Premiere files after encoding, that I could improve quality exponentially. Will that improvement carry over onto youtube at all, given their re-encoding and limitations?

If your camera captures interlaced videos, and you want a progressive video at the end, then you should certainly deinterlace them. Youtube wants progressive material if I'm not wrong, so you have to do it anyway (and you already are, going by your Adobe settings).

If you're talking about "high quality deinterlacing", I don't know how much of the improvement will carry over to Youtube. You'll have to try it yourself if you want to know.

PS ... here is the 1 min 50 second video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMu5ZwrRj4s&fmt=22 -- This is the version encoded at 30 Mbps. Never bothered to do the 8 or 9 one because it was goin to take another hour to encode. Quality isnt too bad I suppose, but I feel like it could be better.
-P-

It doesn't look too bad for a Youtube video, though the zooming seems jerky. There's no need to redo it in 8-9 Mbps; it won't look any better, and may look worse. It doesn't look like there was much detail to preserve in the original clip, anyway.

[Priapism]

Im working with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor P9600 2.66GHz with 4GIG of Memory on 64 bit Vista.

Would improving my hardware speed up processing time?

[creamyhorror]

Using a quad core should speed it up a lot. You should try reducing the bitrate in future and seeing if that makes for acceptable speeds. The encoder has to work much harder to produce a 20Mbps stream than an 8Mbps one.

[zoobie]

looks like TY just changed their method again, doooooood

[lordsmurf]

720p for streaming should really be closer to 3-4Mbps

[creamyhorror]

I forgot to bring up an important point:

- I might be getting the same problem as imk was with his HD uploads - if I upload at somethingx480 the result looks quite bad, almost like vertical resolution has been halved (even though it's still 480). But if I upload at a higher resolution e.g. 768x576 (as my source is PAL anyway), the 640x480 output looks significantly better. I thought doing my own resizing (using lanczos4) would be better but I am clearly wrong! This poses an annoying problem with NTSC sourced material - anyone had better luck with 480 line uploads?

Some guys at Doom9 noticed that Youtube seems to destroy the vertical resolution of videos, i.e. seemingly blurring the videos vertically.

To get around this problem, you have to upscale the video - for example, by going from 480p to 576p.

I'm surprised this isn't more common knowledge, because it's pretty unfortunate.

[themaster1]

1999kbps works great for me, 2pass encoding, 720p 1280x720 or 960x720