Youtube newb help

[Shizam]

Hi there, I'm completely new to video uploading and this site. Well, not completely... Been uploading to Youtube and occasionally lurking here for about 2 weeks now. My goal is to get the best possible quality (with fairly reasonable encoding time) with my Dazzle SD TV video game recordings in 720x480 footage. Things have been working pretty well so far, but I've ventured into the world of AviSynth and things have gotten pretty complex ever since. To be specific, I'm here right now to discuss video resizing for Youtube for now. I have searched the forum, and found some helpful advice but, again, things have gotten a bit complex for me. I'm trying to upscale my footage to 1280x720 while trying to preserve as much of the quality as I can. I'm currently planning to deinterlace (done), crop, resize, and possibly sharpen in AviSynth for the best quality I can reasonably get, and currently I'm working on the cropping and resize part. Here's my cropping plan in script format: (4, 4, -8, -0) 4 in the right, 4 in the left, and 8 in the top.

I'm trying to crop black lines out of my video, then resize it to best maintain my aspect ratio and then apply borders to expand the video to 1280x720 without stretching it. Any ideas on how I can best do that? Also, I heard sharpening doesn't do well at low bitrates. Since Youtube doesn't use an especially high bitrate, would it be better for me to sharpen less?

[manono]

It would probably be best not to sharpen at all. Can you explain why you want to upscale it to 1280x720? Just to get the ability to play it as HD at YouTube? What's the point when it's not HD to begin with?

Post a short 10 second sample from the source as well as the AviSynth script you're using.

[Shizam]

Well the thing is that I'm not 100% sure of how the Youtube player works... I guess my decision to upscale to 720 was hasty, but I felt 720x480 was a bit small for game viewing and the bars Youtube adds are annoying. I thought I would rather lose a bit of quality than have a small video, but I'm not completely sure. I know I said I wanted the best quality possible and that doesn't make much sense upscaling my video, but part of the reason I want great quality is so I can get away with upscaling. I was depending on my best quality footage at 720p to determine whether I kept it at that res or lowered it to 420. Is upscaling THAT bad?

My script is far from finished and only contains deinterlacing and cropping right now, but here it is:

AVISource("C:\Users\namehere\place\Untitled.avi")
LoadPlugin("C:\Users\namehere\place\avisynth\nnedi3\nnedi3.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\Users\namehere\place\avisynth\eedi3 \eedi3.dll")
nnedi3(nns=3,qual=2)
Crop(4, 4, -8, -0)
ConvertToYV12()

I'm using a combination of nnedi3 and eedi3 for deinterlacing. Slow, but seems to work well from what I've seen. I convert to YV12 so I can put my script into meGUI for x264 encoding later on since that's what I've seen Youtube use. Haven't noticed any negative effects from it. I'll edit this with some source footage later.

[manono]

If the 1280x720 is the correct aspect ratio then it's 1.78:1, right? But 720x480 is 1.5 to one. Not only will YouTube add black bars to it, but it'll be displayed with the wrong aspect ratio. People and things will be too tall and too thin. Circles will be almost egg-shaped ovals. You have 2 choices to get these displayed correctly. One would be to resize it while encoding. Something like 848x480 will work. The other is to upload the 720x480 video to YouTube and to have the YouTube player resize it correctly by adding yt:stretch=16:9 in the tag area.

If your main concern is the video being displayed at the wrong aspect ratio, one or the other should take care of it. As for upscaling, my opinion is that it's a complete waste of time since it's not Hi-Def to begin with, many people won't view it that way, and much of the time YouTube can't stream it fast enough to keep it from pausing and stuttering anyway. Up to you, though. I'll let someone else tackle the question of whether or not you're deinterlacing properly.

[Shizam]

I think I'll take your advice and try the original resolution stretched. Should I resize back to 720x480 after cropping? Oh, and could you direct me to a good, fast file sharing site? My internet is not working well right now, and I tried uploading a video to one site but it never happened.

[manono]

If you want the 480p button from YouTube, then the height has to be at least 480. However, with a Crop(4, 4, -8, -0), that changes the aspect ratio slightly if resizing back to 720x480. Maybe it doesn't matter and no one can tell. Me, I'd cut slightly into the video to keep the aspect ratio, something like Crop(4, 6, -8, -2).

For file sharing try MediaFire or SendSpace.

[Shizam]

http://www.sendspace.com/file/m47db1 There's the footage in case you guys have anything more to say. Thanks for your help!

[manono]

Yes, it's just standard interlaced footage. More worrisome is that somewhere along the line, perhaps during the capture, the blacks got shifted into dark grey and all the whites got blown out. If it were I, I'd fix it.

[Shizam]

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that. Nothing I can't fix with Sony Vegas, after some tweaking it seems to look good as new.