Best Export to YouTube Settings

Hi folks,

For the last couple of months I have been using iMovie on my MacBook Air to post my drone videos (which I have just recently got into flying).  The quality of the transfer (filmed in 4K) when using iMovie was great, but I wanted to be able to make my videos look better (editing wise) with graphics and titles so I downloaded the 90 trial version of fcp.  I have tried copying settings recommended in YouTube videos I have watched, but still my transfers look terrible compared to when I was just using iMovie.  Can anyone please advise me why this is the case?  I am pretty new to using an Apple laptop and am not very tech savvy.  Any advise for a newbie like me would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in adavance!

I get excellent results exporting H.264 at around 47mbps. However to do that I create a Compressor preset. Unfortunately there is no 90 day trial for Compressor so you can't really test that.

Try this:

Go to FILE > SHARE > EXPORT FILE then click on the SETTINGS tab. Make sure the FORMAT is VIDEO and AUDIO, not "Apple Devices" or anything like that. Change the codec to H.264 and see what happens. You can't control the bitrate without Compressor, but it seems to give you around 32mbps or so. Don't use a Youtube preset, as those will always skew very low on the bitrate scale. The logic is that Youtube playback is around 8mbps (or whatever) so no need to export at a higher bitrate than that (which is awful logic, by the way). But crap in, crap out as they say. Give it as much to work with as possible when Youtube recompresses your video.

Any better?

BONUS TIP: Give Youtube some time to process the best version of your video. Youtube can sometimes be slow to do this. You usually wanna make sure 1080P is available before you make it public, assuming that's the resolution you uploaded in. 4K can sometimes take much longer to process, especially if you haven't done it much yet on your channel. Anyway, good luck!

Thank you for taking the time to respond! Although some of what you wrote went "over my head" as I still have some much to learn when it comes to all aspects of editing and etc, I will definitely review it all.

I guess my biggest frustration is the fact (as I mentioned in my earlier post) that the transfers when using iMovie looked great, and I don't understand why there is not just a straight forward way to get the same results for a person like me with very limited knowledge to get the same results with fcp?

I will stick with it and play around with the setting etc you recommend...Thanks again!!