best practise to prep video for youtube??

k_munick_munic
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
my source are self-recorded homemovie (iMovie, dv)

made some tests, iSquint has an EXCELLENT mp4 encoder (much better then QT)



youtube recommends 320x240 (NTSC/4 ... sad, me PAL...), and mpeg4..



now, iSquint offers me a manually setting of bitrates; for my private website, I set to 700kB/sec => crystal sharp titles etc...



I'm not familiar with .flv conversion, or how youtube accomplish that task (and with what settings...)



any recommendations from here?

shoudl I stay with 700kB/sec.../ "shi* in, shi*t out" so, upload in best quality possible? => bandwidth... or, is a smaller bitrate "enough"



and bitrate for audio?



or any other tools, settings, encoders (me hobbiest, please avoid Compressor, pro tools as that ) ?



thanks in advance...

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    mbaynhammbaynham Posts: 534member
    i think it is easier to just use imovie, converte it to quicktime format for the web, i did it and the quality was ok, but there was no sound.



    you may have to experiment
  • Reply 2 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    I think isquint is great. I'm not sure you need 700k for 320x240. I use 768 for 640x480 and DVD resolution. You may get away with nearer the 256k mark with 320x240 but it depends on the video.



    I'd use mp4 over flv anyday as long as you use H264. I read somewhere that flv uses H263, which is worse quality per bitrate than H264.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    k_munick_munic Posts: 357member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Marvin

    I think isquint is great. I'm not sure you need 700k for 320x240. I use 768 for 640x480 and DVD resolution. You may get away with nearer the 256k mark with 320x240 but it depends on the video.



    I'd use mp4 over flv anyday as long as you use H264. I read somewhere that flv uses H263, which is worse quality per bitrate than H264.



    thanks Marvin for your profound reply...

    and you're right: the 700kB/s I do use for "full PAL res", not the tiny ones..



    I've posted this question in some forums/fori/???, and obviously nobody does know precisely, what happens at youtube.com while the process of converting "some input" into the youtube.flv..



    I'm not familiar with flash video, have no tools to re-engineer the flvs.. would be interesting, to find out the settings...

    may main concern was, to avoid useless inbetween steps... mpegs are lossy, h263/h264 is lossy... ok, I'm just a user, pushing the mouse since '86... what cares...
  • Reply 4 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    Quote:

    Originally posted by k_munic

    may main concern was, to avoid useless inbetween steps... mpegs are lossy, h263/h264 is lossy.



    Oh, I see what you're saying now. Well according to some sites, it says that quicktime mov files can come out of sync. H264 is probably the best quality but it's slow to encode and may be susceptible to the sync issue. The recommended codec is divx or xvid. You can encode to these formats using ffmpegx or even the official codec I think. To ensure the quality is good enough, you'd just use a higher bitrate but ffmpegx has a calculator for the best bitrate so that you don't lose quality.



    The trouble with youtube is the 100MB upload limit. That's why it's best to use a codec with a good quality per bitrate and the best at the moment are divx/xvid and H264. Normally what you'd be looking for is a lossless intermediate codec. For example Pixlet or motion jpeg on highest. But that's for maintaining quality in a workflow where bandwidth/storage isn't an issue.



    If you got the Flash encoder that comes with Flash Studio, you might be able to encode to flv direct but I don't know if they'd use it or encode again to flv at particular settings. Maybe you could just upload some test movies to see which comes out best. Just one in Divx and one in H264 .mp4 should be fine. You can use whatever bitrate you want really as it will be re-encoded but uploading tends to be slow so don't make it too big.
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