Hi,

I am working on some old standard definition material (DV PAL 25fps). The quality is low but decent enough for my purposes so I did some editing, colour correction, rendered and uploaded to Youtube. The video that YT published however is awful, not only much worse quality (fuzzy, blocky), the colourspace is quite different - really dark and faces are very red (from pretty natural looking in the original rendered file).

I am used to YT messing things up sometimes but this is awful. I tried various things but none with much success. Initially I rendered it as H.264 with a decent bitrate and the rendered video looked fine but YT treats this worst of all and the upload is unusable, especially regarding the colourspace which is the most red and dark. So tried rendering out as the original format (PALDV) and uploading that. It was lighter (but not enough) but the image quality drops noticeably from the rendered file. I tried adjusting the overall gamma which helped up to a point but it still looks all wrong. Colour space in Premiere sequence is Rec. 709.

Maybe YT is just no good for SD material these days but has anyone any experience how to improve things? Maybe render out as HD? Not much experiences in upresing.

Haven't done much video wise for the past few years but I seem to recall that the optimum for upload was 720p.

Also SD has a different structure and it may well be better to render it to HD so that it sorts the fields out etc.

Sorry to be a bit vague but I am way out of touch with things now as I am mainly doing sound again these days.

Thanks Gary, yes I tried rendering as 1080p and that pretty much solved it. It seems the YT treats actual SD video badly, delivering at ultra-low bitrate. Colours were also fine when done as 1080p

Good to hear you got it sorted and I still do most things at 720p as it seems a very efficient compromise.

My Sony DVD does up-res to 1080p but you can see it struggling at times and 720p seems to be a good halfway for SD to HD on our new LG 60 inch UHD TV.

I was a bit sceptical - so I uploaded and SD clip to youtube and let it have that to deal with, then upscaled the clip to HD in premiere and then uploaded thAT

THIS ONE IS SD UPSCALED TO HD
https://youtu.be/DpgSY-EORYE
THIS ONE IS SD END TO END
https://youtu.be/AANTDxdcD9E

Interesting.

I wonder why YT deals with those SD clips okay? It certainly did not for my edit.

It might be to do with the quality of the SD material perhaps. Mine is from 2008, shot on a modest camcorder, and is in 4:3. Maybe it just sees it as 'crap' quality.