Aspect Ratio Question + Some

[Alexander4444]

My sister and I have been working on a project and we are at the point where we need to do the daunting deed of exposing our relatively good quality video to YouTube's handling.

We captured footage with a Nikon D300s using its 'Live Mode' function at a resolution of 1280 x 720 (16:9).

Upon importing the footage into iMovie, we chose an aspect ratio of 4:3 (was that the best decision for the ultimate goal of a high quality YouTube posting...does it matter?)

Having finished editing, we exported from iMovie a relatively good looking .m4v using iMovie's 'Large' setting - 720 x 540.

The degradation of the video after uploading this file to YouTube was apparent and a far cry from the quality of the .m4v.



Next we tried exporting using iMovie's option of "Export Using Quicktime". This method gives us a lot of options.

We maxed out every setting to achieve the greatest visual quality.

-Used the recommended H.264 compression type

-Set the compressor quality to 'best'.

-Used the 'current' frame rate

- for the size we've tried both 1280 x 720 and 1980 x 1020 on two separate occasions.


The results upon uploading to YouTube on both of those occasions are negligibly different when compared to the first method.



What can we do (or do differently) so that the quality of the resulting YouTube post looks near the same as the quality of the exported video from iMovie?

It's out of the question to go back and choose different initial settings for the iMovie project.

Thank you for any and all help on this time sensitive issue!

[Calidore]

Is there a way to convert it to YouTube's specs yourself so that they don't reconvert it with whatever their defaults are? Maybe you can do a high-quality conversion that they'll leave alone.

[Cornucopia]

1st, you should take a look at Youtubes requirements & recommendations regarding input file formats & specs...

2nd, if your original DAR was 720p/16:9, KEEP it that way! All through the chain. YES, IT MATTERS.

3rd, for best quality output with youtube, give it the BEST quality input. Yes, it will be a huge, !*!#($'n file, but then it'll stay a better quality. Use an editing codec, not a distribution codec.

4th, *.M4V tells me that it's likely an MPEG4 (but not H.264) codec. This is not optimal - particularly Apple's implementation of it.

5th, Don't RESIZE back up, particularly Not via iMovie or Quicktime!! (see 1st item)

Try doing a very short example clip @ 1280x720 and export to Quicktime, using the Animation codec (100% quality setting). Upload that and tell us how it goes from there...

Scott

[Alexander4444]

Thank you Calidore for the quick response and thank you especially scott for your sharing what must of taken a hole lot of research and experimentation to figure out (there's so much subtlety in A/V data processing!). I am away from the computer that contains the project, but wanted to acknowledge our appreciation for the help. I will write back about the results later.

[Cornucopia]

Is there a way to convert it to YouTube's specs yourself so that they don't reconvert it with whatever their defaults are? Maybe you can do a high-quality conversion that they'll leave alone.

No, that capability went away year before last. Best you can do is give them an uncompressed or lightly-compressed Master clip, which they will store and encode to the best of THEIR ability (which at least is getting better all the time). Periodically, they'll re-encode from that master if their codecs/specs/capabilities/pipelines improve. At least, that's what they tell you on their website.

Scott

[Alexander4444]

Is there a way to convert it to YouTube's specs yourself so that they don't reconvert it with whatever their defaults are? Maybe you can do a high-quality conversion that they'll leave alone.

No, that capability went away year before last. Best you can do is give them an uncompressed or lightly-compressed Master clip, which they will store and encode to the best of THEIR ability (which at least is getting better all the time). Periodically, they'll re-encode from that master if their codecs/specs/capabilities/pipelines improve. At least, that's what they tell you on their website.

Scott

Ah, I see. So the best case senario is to upload to YouTube the uncompressed version of the video and let their codecs do the work. That makes a lot of sense (coming from an audio background) where you as the mixing engineer should always send to the mastering engineer audio that is both dynamically uncompressed (meaning no compressor on the master fader to reduce dynamic levels of the audio) and digitally uncompressed (the raw .aiff file generated when you bounce down all of the tracks). That totally makes sense and thank you for making us aware.

Right now, we are uploading the video that was exported using the animation codec. Even for a 6 second clip it's going to take a while. As I understand it, YouTube codecs will treat content that is in HD format as HD. Meaning to say that as long as we export at 1080, YouTube will see the file as HD and provide the option of viewing in HD. This is the plan of action we took when exporting with the animation codec. We just don't know if YouTube has a bias for using better codecs on their end if the content is at 1080. When exporting we chose 'preserve aspect ratio' using 'letterboxing'. Hopefully all of these settings work.

Our former attempt of exporting from Quicktime at 1080 caused YouTube to provide the HD option. Stupidly, we were not setting YouTube's player to display in HD (at the bottom right of the player). Once we had, we saw the quality we originally hoped for.

We can only assume because the raw file size that is being uploaded to YouTube right now, that the resulting video will be much higher quality (especially when viewed in HD)

Without question we are going to look into various editor codecs. That was a really good point and we are sure that will make a big difference in the future. To clarify, is an editor codec one that is essentially lossless? If yes, then we see why the animation codec is the best to use.

Thank you Scott once again for all of your solid help! You've made learning a very vast and complicated subject much less unnerving

[Cornucopia]

No problem. Maybe my nomenclature & stance helped, since I also do Audio Editing & Mastering.

There are 3 main types of codes: Capture, Editing, Distribution

Capture is usually optimized to the capture/creation hardware used, editing optimized for ease & speed of editing, and distribution optimized for efficient playout (speed/quality). These different optimization criteria make them lean in different directions...

Cap & edit codecs are usually compressed (though can be uncompressed), either losslessly or visually/aurally near-lossless (though actually lightly lossy). Edit codecs are built with quality-even-in-multiple-render-generations in mind (aka Least amount of Damage). They are USUALLY less taxing on the CPU, but more taxing on the bandwidth/pipeline/subsystem.
Distribution codecs are VERY LOSSY and built for low-medium bandwidth. They are particularly taxing in an edit situation because of some of the optimizations (chroma reduction & long GOPs being the best examples). These are the final, end-of-the-road, consumer formats (MPEG2/DVD, Divx, MP4/h.264/AVC, Flash/FLV, WebM, etc.)

Note on Youtube: AFAIK, they still have a 10-minute program length limit.

HTH,

Scott

[Alexander4444]

Thank you Scott once again for sharing your wealth of information. Looks like I have some woodshedding to do in the visual media department Here is the video that was made to look better by the information you gave. I'm the guitarist and composer of the music you hear throughout the video. My sister did all of the video editing. The funny story about the musical composition starts when my sister was editing the video together and turns to me and says, 'You're right, it's too long just to have the same guitar part repeating." This was after my friend Kurt, who's the singer in the upper left hand corner of the video when it splits to 4 screens, and I had tried to convince my sister that more music than just that guitar part would be required to make the video enjoyable. Unfortunately, my sister's realization of this occurred while we were in a hotel in LA attending ASCAP - far from the normal studio set up that I depend on. Thankfully, we had brought an Axiom 49 MIDI keyboard and, of course, had a couple of laptops, one of which had Logic. Though I use Logic about 2 minutes for every 5 hours I log into the use of Pro Tools - I had to find a way to make due. It was frustrating at first - but the pressure of getting the project done in the expected time of all of the participants caused for a very quick learning of the software and simultaneous creation of the music you hear. After returning home, I put on the finishing touches - a few guitar licks here and there, and mixed it as best as I could in the time I had left with the Mackie HR624 speakers we have. My sister all the while was creating the sequences, transitions, and subtitling that, as far as we can still tell today, must have superseded the expected use of the iMovie application. My sister was going crazy with the resultant glitches that were cropping up. Upon exporting the movie - that is where you came in. Once we saw how YouTube's compression affected our relatively good looking video, we knew there had to be a better way. Ultimately, based on the information you gave us about maintaining the DAR from start to finish, my sister redid the entire project with a setting of 16:9 which definitely improved things. We ended up exporting using iMovie's "Export Using Quicktime" functionality and let H.264 set to best do its work. The size was set to 720. Though the animation codec is definitely the better choice for the reasons that it is pretty much lossless, the file size that would have resulted and the time that it would have taken to upload that file to YouTube was something we couldn't afford. We did, however, test it out on a short clip that we uploaded to YouTube to see how it would look. We set its size to 720 as well, and it looked great - only that YouTube's processing of it caused a significant overall darkening of everything. I guess, in the future, when we use the animation codec in tandem with HD settings for the sake of an upload to YouTube, we can offset the darkening effect by lightening the exported file by a pretested for amount. Enjoy the video Scott and know that you played an important role in its creation! Thanks again!

Oh, and YouTube increased the maximum length of a video upload to 15 minutes.