Optimum Quality for Youtube in HD
 

I'm Shooting with a Canon XL H1 editing in FCP. I can export with compressor or quicktime conversion. I shot in HD 16:9 30 frames. Looking for best results on export settings. anyone have experience with this? They now accept up to one gig. How do I maximize?

Try this:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/dvd-web-v...y-youtube.html

Hi Simon, there are lots of posts describing the settings that get good results, its worthwhile to do a search for them here and with Google.

I'll offer a response that is not the typical "do this." I think no matter what quality we initially throw at YT, we have to worry more about the final quality that YT uses for its re-encode, which I think is somewhere around 1.5MB/s. With the reencode that low, this becomes the limiting factor of final quality.

To have video look its best on the web we must start by shooting video that looks good at that low a bitrate. This means starting off with a decent camera with good lighting, keeping motion to a pleasant minimum, keeping backgrounds simple, having good contrast in the shot, and all the other things that benefit that final compression that YT does.

In my experiences, starting off with YT friendly material means I don't need to throw uncompressed video or 20MB/s WMV or MP4 at YT to get the best results. Often I just encode my final video at 4MB/s 2 pass MP4.