Is it youtube or is it me?

[Josh Bass]

Video/encoding geniuses, I humbly beg for your help.

I'm occasionally (and nonprofessionally) a songwriter in addition to being a video/filmmaker guy. I decided while back that I would make "lyric videos" for my songs (thus making them videos instead of just audio works of "art") so I could put them on youtube.

I've done a few, it's been generally no trouble. They work fine, all is well. This most recent one is just not working right. Most of the times I've tried to upload it it fails (upload freezes at various points), and when I've gotten to work (this is three times as of writing this), it's super glitchy, both audio and video. I can't figure out why.

It's been awhile since I've done one of these videos, but I believe I used the same settings last time I did and that video is fine.

Here's what I've done - this is via compressor, from a file created from Apple Motion 3 using the "broadcast 720p" filter (it's about a 2 minute song):

mov/h264 2000kbps, 720p, AAC audio at 320 kpbs 48khz. Should be progressive as the field order in my original motion file are set to "none".

Comes out to a tiny 35MB file, and still I have all these issues.

I've tried different browsers, same diff. From what I've read, youtube loves H264, and MP4 gives me this annoying thing where every second or so it plxellates and then unpixellates.

Any insight? Here's the horrid current result (btw, uploaded fine to facebook and vimeo):
BassSquared - YouTube

[R Geoff Baker]

That's a mighty low bitrate for a 720p video -- why wouldn't you use a much higher one, generate a much larger file, and let Youtube do the magic? Trying to get it so small right off the bat seems a mistake. I use a target of 8000 kbps for 1080p stuff, I'd have thought 6000 for 720p was the ballpark. It looks to me (though I only viewed the first few seconds) as if you are too short of bit rate, which throws everything into confusion when ever there is a shot change or a title introduced.

Cheers,
GB

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Youtube transcodes h264 sometimes if it can't figure out the file. Better to start with the best quality, as Geoff suggested.

[Josh Bass]

In the future I may try the higher bitrates.

Here's the the thing though. . .I DID try youtube's own recommended settings, which include setting the BR to "automatic".

This created a 400+MB file, which froze during upload.

Furthermore, I gave the 2000 kbps/35MB file to another DVinfo member to try on his own account, worked for him. Gave it to my girlfriend to try from her laptop on MY account. . .and it worked!

Tried an older file I'd uploaded 4 months ago successfully. . .exact same file (except for a name change). . .froze!

Could there be something on my computer/network/server/ISP/computer stuff I don't understand that could be screwing something up for me?

[Matt Sharp]

Josh it sounds like your connection is dropping in the middle of your uploads which effectively kills the upload. I regularly upload 700MB-2GB files to youtube without a problem.