Youtube Upload

[Bill DiPietra]

Hey all. As I absolutely despise Youtube's compression rates I've never uploaded anything of my own, but now I need to. Can anyone tell me how large a video file you can upload with a basic account? I'm trying to find the specs on the site but they are proving to be rather elusive...

 

Thanks for any help.

[Tyler Purcell]

Youtube is limited to what file's it can handle. I suggest making a .h264 10Mbps encode for 720p and you can kick that up to 15Mbps for 1080p. That encode process will automatically make the file 8 bit 4:2:0 which is what Youtube is natively. Youtube likes long gop MPEG files, but it doesn't support professional formats like iframe MPEG, Pro Res or JPEG2000 (MXF AVID/RED code). I believe Youtube restricts your account to 10 minute uploads unless you verify it. This process is easy, it just calls your cell phone or text messages you. Just do a google search for "how do I verify my youtube account" and there will be a link.

 

Imagine youtube being like a windows based PC, where it doesn't support anything without plugins and throws unwanted hurtles into your life.

Vimeo on the other hand is like a mac, it supports everything and the compression looks MUCH better. Pay for the best and you get the best.

 

Vimeo uses the native quicktime engine format's, so that opens the doors for Pro Res, which is great.

 

My normal workflow is to export a Pro Res LT file as my "web master" and upload to Vimeo via FTP (much faster) which takes a while since Pro Res LT is a very heavy format. Still, it appears to deliver the best quality and so far I haven't seen very much 8bit banding going on, which is something you see on youtube all the time and I personally can't stand it.

 

Vimeo charges around $200/year for their professional services and it's worth every penny. No commercials, no royalties issues, FTP access, build your own playback embedding engine (very cool) and 50gb per month worth of uploads, which is not bad. I use it for all my commercial products and I feel it's the best service by a fair margin.

[Bill DiPietra]

Okay, thanks.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Haven't uploaded anything to YouTube in a long time, but on a Vimeo free account, I believe the max size is 500MB/week. Since everything I upload is fairly short, 2-3 min for reels, tests, and preview edits, I tend to make a 35-45mbps 1920x1080p h264 file in Adobe Media Encoder from my Prores master. I adjust the bit rate until I can get the file just under the 500MB limit, and I find that is usually good enough to avoid compression artifacts on all but the most challenging shots.

 

Film grain is challenging to compress and definitely requires a higher bit rate to reproduce faithfully. You may find you have to use noise reduction or other tools to filter out the grain if you are stuck with encoding to a lower a bitrate. Otherwise, you risk having lots of pixelation artifacts. I have tried encoding at 720p as well, but the final result just doesn't look as sharp to me even though Vimeo is compressing down to 720p anyway (only with the free version, the paid version will do 1080p).