YouTube Compression: 1080p vs. 720p | Still Confused!

Greetings!

Well, I've read almost everything I can find, but still lots of confusion on which settings to use for uploading to YouTube. I'm shooting in 1080p with a Canon XF300. Oftentimes, I find my videos play back with "jerky" motion and stutter on YouTube, especially during pans or tilts. While my Internet has never been the fastest, other videos seem to play back fine in 1080p.

It seems like there are varying opinions. Some say they always compress and upload in 720p, regardless of whether they shot in 1080p. Others say to upload the best quality file, as YouTube does it's own compression. If you shoot in 1080p, compress and upload the same. I've heard concerns some can't play 1080p files without stuttering, etc., due to their connection speed. That's kind of what I was experiencing.

I apologize if this has been covered to death, but can someone please point me in the right direction? Is the difference between 1080p and 720p that noticeable on YouTube? Do the same principles apply to Vimeo? What have you all had success with?

Thanks!

Craig

Who is your audience and what is their expectation? My little videos are for family members and friends. I upload at 720p. It looks OK when played full screen on modern size monitors yet isn't so heavy as to be too slow for those with moderate internet speeds.

My compression settings are (roughly) High Profile CABAC with keyframes every 15 frames and bandwidth set to 10000 kbps (10Mbps). That's a bit under 5 GB/hour

Here's a guideline from YouTube themselves:
support.google.com/youtube/answer/172217...en&ref_topic=2888648

Vimeo seems to have less compression. Therefore, the image quality is better (vimeo users mostly know what they are doing). You have a longer load time though.

Marchyman:

It's generally client projects. Home tour videos, promos, online copies of commercials, video blogs, etc.

Craig

Cgbier:

Thanks! I've checked out those settings before. Find it odd Compressor's default presets don't quite match up with that. For instance, YouTube recommends the entropy mode be set to CABAC, while the preset for YouTube in Compressor defaults to CAVLC. Some of the other setting recommendations I can't even find in Compressor.

Admittedly, I'm in the midst of diving in a little deeper with Compressor, but I'm still wanting to see what others are doing...

Craig

I do mostly educational videos that include charts and text so I like to get the extra bit of resolution that I see in 1080. The settings I use for both vimeo and youtube are:



I have found it helpful to make sure "Add clean aperture information" is unchecked to prevent unintended cropping.

I'm also using x264, and its settings are:



For audio, I use:



I've come to these by reading a lot of recommended settings and then my own trial and error, but I haven't done extensive testing. Others may well have improvements beyond this but it seems to be a good starting point. As always, YMMV.

Are you watching Youtube using Firefox? If so that's causing your stuttery, jerky motion. It's hard to get it perfectly smooth but it will play back a lot better with, say, Chrome on Windows. But even Safari and Chrome on Mac should provide for a smoother Youtube experience.

Bottom line: It's not your fault.

"It's generally client projects"

Then perhaps 1080p is a better choice than 720p.

Compressor's defaults are possibly a carry-over from earlier versions when CABAC wasn't supported. I haven't yet tries with the current version, but CABAC was limited to 1 pass encoding. I did a couple of test encodes to determine that CABAC w/1-pass was about the same quality as CAVLC w/2-pass on my videos -- but a lot faster to encode.

I probably need to do some more test encodes using the current version of Compressor.

For YouTube, if you have the option, 1080p is better than 720p, and all lower resolutions will be generated anyway. The issues you've had sound like a frame rate or interlacing mismatch rather than anything else.
For Vimeo, you need a plus or pro account to serve 1080p, you'll have to choose it explicitly, and then 720p will be unavailable for that video — they won't serve both HD formats.

However, both YouTube and Vimeo will recompress whatever you send them. In 1080p, YouTube give about 2.5Mbps to video, and Vimeo gives about 3.75Mbps. Vimeo looks much better, but it doesn't matter too much what you give them, because it's so much higher (15-20Mbps typically) than what they spit back out.

The exception is when you upload 4K footage to YouTube, which will then give more bandwidth even to the lower 1080p version.

Finally, Vimeo do optionally allow the download of the original file and YouTube do not.

Thanks to everyone for their input! I think I'm going to take some of the information from here and other resources, and do a little more experimenting to see what works best for me. You've been quite helpful!

Just to add that the CABAC options in 4.1 are still limited to single pass. The X.264 encoder, however, does allow multi-pass (up to 3X).

Russ

One reason CABAC in Compressor 4 is single-pass is because it leans on Intel's QuickSync hardware encoding (in recent i5/i7 CPUs, but not the Mac Pro's Xeon). QuickSync is very fast, and in my informal testing the quality compares well with x264 encodes.

And what a difference it is. A 40 second 720p 330 MB ProRes 422 file encoded to a 48 MB h.264 movie in 6 seconds using High Profile 1 pass CABAC. Changing only the video option to two pass (which automatically selects CAVLC) generated a 53 MB h.264 movie in 1:29. 6 seconds or a minute and a half. You choose.

There are some slight difference in the output. Sometimes I like one better, sometimes the other. The differences would probably be lost in a youtube recode. I'll stick with the fast version.

Do the test yourself. The results might be different with your source materia.

If you're outputting files that take a long time to encode, remember in Compressor you can set In and Out points to only encode a few seconds for testing purposes.

Also, be aware YouTube converts everything to WebM video, after you convert yours. Thus, I always use a ProRes file. May take longer to upload, but gives me my best quality once YouTube re-compresses it.

YouTube converts to a range of formats, frame sizes and bitrates, including WebM and H.264. In practice I suspect almost everybody sees H.264, since that's what it serves to Flash players (and you still have to opt in to get YouTube's HTML5 player, which is perhaps a good thing given that it's a bit flaky).

Uploading ProRes is a decent approach if you have the bandwidth for it. For the rest of us, high-bitrate H.264 doesn't lose all that much in recompression, at least compared with the crappy displays our labours of love end up being watched on.

Wow!

A wealth of information from everyone. The experimentation continues!...

Craig