• ✅ Technical and creative solutions for your film.
    ✅ Screenplay formatting help, plot and story guidance.
    ✅ A respectful community of professionals and newbies.
    ✅ Network with composers, editors, cast, crew, and more!
    🎬 IndieTalk - Filmmaking and Screenwriting help site and community.
    By filmmakers, for filmmakers since 2003

I Hate Encoding

USNFilms

USNFilms

I'm having problems with the quality of my new video on YouTube, found here. I believe that my video looks blurry, pixelated, and low quality on 360p compared to other videos on 360p, especially this one here. I mean, seriously, My video and the other video were filmed with the same camera (rebel t3i), yet on 360p in Youtube their's looks soooo much better.

I want to fix this because I want my videos to look good on 360p because most people don't bother switching to 720 or 1080p hd. I rendered out of adobe premiere pro cs5 with the H264 codec wrapped in Mp4. VBR 2 pass, 23.976fps, 1920x1080, target bitrate set at 50Mbps, max bitrate set at 60Mbps, maximum render quality. File came out to be shy of 2gbs and I uploaded it.

I've tried sooo many other codecs and settings yet the one above looks the best, but it still looks terrible compared to that other video I posted. WHY IS THIS? sorry I'm just so angry. Is adobe premiere pro just bad for rendering? Should I use different settings? Any help is appreciated.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
It's not your encoding settings - you are already producing just about the highest quality master file you can. The image is softer on youtube because their encoder is having trouble handling your material cleanly. The most likely culprit I see is camera movement. I didn't watch your whole video, but what I did see was mostly handheld and the camera was constantly moving around, sometimes quite fast and uneven. Fast, uneven movement is one of the hardest things to encode well at low bitrates. The left 4 dead video you posted had much less movement in most of the shots - even though the opening couple of shots look handheld they have very subtle motion. Later they do have more dramatic handheld shots but they tend to be intercut with shots that are mostly static - this lets the VBR encoding 'save up' extra data during static shots to use on the shaky shots. Yours is constantly moving most of the time with only the occasional static shot so it's not possible to do that.

High detail is the other thing that is hard to encode at low bitrates. Most of your shots have a background of trees - all those leaves, especially with the high contrast of your footage, make for a ton of detail that is tough to encode cleanly. There's as much detail in the background as there is in the actors in the foreground, and the encoder doesn't know the difference so it tries to encode it all and fails. Combine that with constant shaky motion and there's just no way to keep it clean at low bitrates. Watch the handheld sequence in Left 4 Dead around the 3 minute mark - the background is low contrast and without a ton of detail compared to the actors. If things get a little soft in the background no one notices, and the encoder can retain more details in the important areas like the actors face.

So if you want better low bandwidth video you're going to need to shoot with that kind of thing in mind. It's too late to do much about it with your current video.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
ItDonnedOnMe pretty much summed it up. I also believe that individuals who do watch short films and random filmmaker clips do watch the videos in 720 or 1080p. If the clips are just cat videos and random pictures meshed together then I'd say you are right, they don't bother turning the res up to HD. As long as your 720p and 1080p look good then I think you will be fine.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Just for schitzengiggles, try uploading two different versions:
- your current HD version with current settings as seem to be working, and
- a second version using a frame rate of 30 saved as an MP4 AVI file. Those seem to work fine for the minimal rendering.

The good one will look good.
The cruddy one will look... not AS cruddy as trying to make a sows ear out of a silk purse.

GL! & Happy New Year-ish! ;)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
ItDonnedOnMe said:
It's not your encoding settings - you are already producing just about the highest quality master file you can. The image is softer on youtube because their encoder is having trouble handling your material cleanly. The most likely culprit I see is camera movement. I didn't watch your whole video, but what I did see was mostly handheld and the camera was constantly moving around, sometimes quite fast and uneven. Fast, uneven movement is one of the hardest things to encode well at low bitrates. The left 4 dead video you posted had much less movement in most of the shots - even though the opening couple of shots look handheld they have very subtle motion. Later they do have more dramatic handheld shots but they tend to be intercut with shots that are mostly static - this lets the VBR encoding 'save up' extra data during static shots to use on the shaky shots. Yours is constantly moving most of the time with only the occasional static shot so it's not possible to do that.

High detail is the other thing that is hard to encode at low bitrates. Most of your shots have a background of trees - all those leaves, especially with the high contrast of your footage, make for a ton of detail that is tough to encode cleanly. There's as much detail in the background as there is in the actors in the foreground, and the encoder doesn't know the difference so it tries to encode it all and fails. Combine that with constant shaky motion and there's just no way to keep it clean at low bitrates. Watch the handheld sequence in Left 4 Dead around the 3 minute mark - the background is low contrast and without a ton of detail compared to the actors. If things get a little soft in the background no one notices, and the encoder can retain more details in the important areas like the actors face.

So if you want better low bandwidth video you're going to need to shoot with that kind of thing in mind. It's too late to do much about it with your current video.
Click to expand...

Thanks for taking the time to explain, that does make a lot of sense - and I'll keep it in mind when I film my next vid.

rayw said:
Just for schitzengiggles, try uploading two different versions:
- your current HD version with current settings as seem to be working, and
- a second version using a frame rate of 30 saved as an MP4 AVI file. Those seem to work fine for the minimal rendering.

The good one will look good.
The cruddy one will look... not AS cruddy as trying to make a sows ear out of a silk purse.

GL! & Happy New Year-ish! ;)
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if I can render out at 30 because my footage is 23.976 so........
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Try it!
C'mon!
Live life on the ragged edge!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can render 23.976 as pretty much whatever is available.
Also, there are plenty of free downloadable video format converters available.
It's youtube, so... you know. And we're talking about their 360p resolution, so... lossy rendering don't really matter much.
Juno?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top