Video editing techniques

[robshaw]

Im having trouble with getting good quality footage uploaded to youtube. By good quality I mean picture quality rather than content (got a long way to go before my content is any good).  I have a gopro 3 silver and the raw footage from that is awesome. But by the time i';ve edited it and uploaded it to YouTube it looks awful. 

What sort of file size do you guys upload to youtube? Are we talking many gb';s??  I use iMovie on my macbook pro and use the share to youtube button and select ';medium'; (which I guess is the quality but to be fair the quality has already dropped dramatically after I have imported the footage into iMovie.

Thanks guys.

Rob

[Cozp83]

what ya editing with man?

[robshaw]

iMovie on my Macbook Pro.

[Cozp83]

imovie adds a lot of noise when rendering the footage, also the codec choice is very limited, get a copy of premiere pro man, and itll give you more options when it comes to encoding the footage. once you get premiere dude, ill tell ya how to set it up for good footage

[powerlord]

Sorry to disagree but iMovie does not add any noise during editing. It uses apple intermediary codec - an excellent hi bitrate codec.

Firstly your YouTube uploads will never look as good as local - YouTube re encodes at 2.5kbs.

However as long as you give it a decent upload quality the results are usually pretty good.

In my experience apples setting verge on the conservative side - creating far higher bitrate than YouTube needs, but guaranteeing your video will look the best on YouTube. You don';t say if you are uploading 720 or 1080p ?

Farther uploading, you can find the video it uploaded in your iMovies projects directory and check the quality of it yourself.

Stu (semi pro video editor for 15+ years)

[robshaw]

Thanks for the input guys.  Ive revisited the YouTube upload page within imovie and am now trying a 720p upload (1080p is greyed out) on a small clip of footage. My only concern with this is the file sizes are massive and my broadband upload speed isn';t that great.
Regarding the Adobe Premier Pro option, Id love to give it a try but its sooo expensive.  Bit beyond my needs and requirements. Think Imovie tweaking is the order of the day. 

[Cozp83]

read the second post and follow the links.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1305237

it use an apple intermediary codec NOT PRORES.

Sorry to disagree but iMovie does not add any noise during editing. It uses apple intermediary codec - an excellent hi bitrate codec.

Firstly your YouTube uploads will never look as good as local - YouTube re encodes at 2.5kbs.

However as long as you give it a decent upload quality the results are usually pretty good.

In my experience apples setting verge on the conservative side - creating far higher bitrate than YouTube needs, but guaranteeing your video will look the best on YouTube. You don';t say if you are uploading 720 or 1080p ?

Farther uploading, you can find the video it uploaded in your iMovies projects directory and check the quality of it yourself.

Stu (semi pro video editor for 15+ years)

[powerlord]

Yup, as I said aic. While not as good as prores422 it is still a very good intermediary codec. Up to the job of broadcast shoots when required.

[secretman]

just use vimeo real quality video clip , same as the upload.... for real hd vimeo only ..

[powerlord]

Read the thread. Yeh fair point there. 2 things:

1. Always import into iMovie at original res not medium or large.
2. Expect a little banding on flat colour areas. Eg blue sky. It';s in those areas that AIC tends to he deficient, but at the same time it';s here that youtube';s re encoding will also band.
3. If your footage is 1080p, edit in 1080p (original) and upload in 1080p.
4. As I said the file sizes the apple share menu (it';s the same one in fcpx) creates are around 3x the size they really need to be, but optimising them down is not simple unless you knw what you are doing - so best just let it take its time to upload.
5. If you really must optimise because your band width is so poor, export the master file from iMovie and use handbrake. But you';ll need to play with bitrates, multipass, and some of the advanced options to create a good quality smaller file size. IMHO it';s just not worth it - remember that all you are doing is giving YouTube a file that it is going to re encode anyway to the same bitrate whatever you do. So garbage in, garbage out. Your far better giving YouTube the highest quality file you can and this is the apple shared one

[robshaw]

Thanks guys. Good advice. I';ve been experimenting with some settings. I';ve hammered my broadband with uploads but I think I';ve got some much better quality results.

Only tried short bit of film for test purposes but going to try a something more substantial in next day or two.

Thanks again.

Rob.