[0:00] - Today's topic is a video
[0:01] that I've been wanting
to make for over a year.
[0:03] In fact, it's the reason
[0:05] that I rebuilt my studio into this set
[0:07] from the previous purple one,
[0:08] which I think was like,
yeah, over a year now.
[0:10] It's weird to think I've been
in this new set for that long.
[0:12] This is just gonna be loose
notes, and I'm just gonna talk,
[0:15] and I really hope this is
useful for any content creators
[0:17] that upload YouTube
[0:18] or people that want to just
export videos in general,
[0:21] and maybe they're gonna live
on the web at some point.
[0:23] So I'm gonna be showing you some samples.
[0:24] Now, the only issue here
[0:25] is that those samples are
gonna be doubly compressed,
[0:28] because I'll be taking them from YouTube,
[0:31] which has already had
YouTube compression applied,
[0:33] which is important, because
that's what I wanna show you.
[0:35] But that means when they get
uploaded again to this video,
[0:38] they're gonna be even
more YouTube compressed.
[0:42] But both of the side-by-sides
will have the same treatment.
[0:45] So it should still be comparable.
[0:47] But if you wanna see the original upload,
[0:49] you can always go back to that
video and scrub through it,
[0:50] and look at what I'm talking about
[0:52] when I reference an older video.
[0:53] This set, if you look at it now,
[0:55] is sort of a lighter gray on both sides,
[0:59] and there's a lot of stuff on it.
[1:00] And if you compare it to the previous set,
[1:02] it was purple, it was dark,
and it had a light gradient.
[1:07] The paint was dark purple,
[1:09] and then there was a light
that kind of made it, you know,
[1:11] go through different shades of purple.
[1:12] And I did a similar set
to that years before.
[1:15] You think I would've learned my lesson.
[1:16] YouTube hates gradients,
[1:19] don't do it, especially dark gradients.
[1:21] If you have a really light
gradient, which I have here,
[1:24] if you look close, you might
see there is some banding and,
[1:28] you know, macroblocking
and artifacts and stuff,
[1:30] but it's not near as bad as
the dark purple gradient.
[1:33] But another thing to keep in mind
[1:34] is that YouTube doesn't like dark.
[1:36] There's sort of like a
category of of ranges,
[1:39] of luminance ranges,
where if it's pure black,
[1:42] it's okay, 'cause it's
just gonna be black,
[1:44] and it's not gonna be compressed,
[1:46] like nothing's gonna be given to it
[1:47] 'cause it's no data anyway,
it's gonna be black.
[1:49] But if you go slightly up from black,
[1:52] you could probably maybe use
my t-shirt as an example here,
[1:55] or this thing over here,
[1:56] you have a little bit of a wiggle room,
[1:59] where it'll be mostly kind of crushed down
[2:01] and still look okay.
[2:02] But when you get to that
dark purple area that I had,
[2:05] or anything up to about middle gray,
[2:08] that's where it's light enough
to be seen in the frame,
[2:11] but not light enough to be
given enough data to look good.
[2:15] So you just get like
much larger compression
[2:18] than you would on a lighter scene.
[2:21] So I thought, "Well, I can fix that.
[2:22] I'll make this new set, and
this new set will have...
[2:25] Everything will be higher key,
[2:27] and the gradients will be minimized,"
[2:30] like they're up here, "and
they'll also be broken up,"
[2:33] which is another good piece
of advice, break up your shot.
[2:37] You see I've got props in the background.
[2:39] The peg board behind me is textured,
[2:42] which we'll talk a little
bit more about this,
[2:44] but sometimes can help based
on principles of like dithering
[2:47] and film grain and stuff like that.
[2:48] But all this helps to eliminate the sort
[2:52] of gradient banding effect
that YouTube will create.
[2:55] However, I've introduced a new problem,
[2:57] which is why I never
made the video of like,
[2:58] "Here's how to make a set
[2:59] that YouTube won't compress as heavily,"
[3:01] which is that when I made this
set, I started to look worse.
[3:06] So I'm gonna try to
illustrate something now,
[3:07] look at the details of my
face, look at my pores,
[3:09] look at my, you know, whatever,
[3:11] nose and hair, and all that stuff.
[3:12] If I make the rest of
the frame extremely dark,
[3:16] it's quite likely, 'cause
I've done this test myself,
[3:19] that all of a sudden,
[3:20] I get sharper and all the
details look better on me.
[3:24] YouTube only sort of gives
you so many bits to work with.
[3:28] And if you create a scene that's brighter
[3:30] and has all this other stuff in it
[3:31] to defeat the bad
banding dark scene issue,
[3:35] well, now, this stuff requires bits,
[3:38] and those bits get taken
away from your face,
[3:40] or rather spread more evenly throughout,
[3:41] so you get less detail on your face.
[3:43] I think these are important things,
[3:44] because if you can start
with the set design,
[3:48] a production design, then
it helps when it comes
[3:50] to just changing settings
on your computer,
[3:52] which we're about to get to now.
[3:53] If you shoot with a picture profile
[3:55] that doesn't add any sharpening,
[3:57] for instance, I shoot this one in S-Log3,
[3:59] and I have the sharpening turned
all the way down in camera,
[4:02] 'cause I like to do it in post.
[4:03] And in fact, I don't do it in post,
[4:06] because when I watch
the file on my computer,
[4:08] not on YouTube, it looks great.
[4:10] Just that 4K export,
there's enough detail there.
[4:13] With the lens that I use
and the camera I use,
[4:15] there's enough detail,
[4:16] like I'm looking at myself
on the monitor right now,
[4:17] and I go, "This shot looks outstanding."
[4:20] Then I upload it to YouTube,
face gets all mushy.
[4:23] If you add sharpening, or
rather do add sharpening,
[4:27] well, if you're using a profile
[4:28] that already has quite a
bit of sharpening applied,
[4:30] like some of the profiles are just fit
[4:32] for delivery right away,
[4:33] then maybe you don't need to add it.
[4:35] What I would say is, for me,
[4:37] when I add just enough
sharpening that it starts
[4:41] to look slightly
over-sharpened on my computer,
[4:46] that's good for YouTube.
[4:47] YouTube makes everything softer.
[4:48] This isn't fully, like,
[4:50] just a, like, targeted compression thing,
[4:53] it's just everything looks
a bit softer on YouTube.
[4:55] So sharpen it a bit too much in advance,
[4:58] so that when it gets to YouTube,
[4:59] it falls back to the right sharpening.
[5:01] This made a huge difference for me,
[5:03] probably the single biggest
difference, I can say,
[5:06] that slightly over-sharpen your footage,
[5:08] and it'll look way better on YouTube.
[5:10] Of course, if you are shooting an S-Log3,
[5:12] somebody might have some
LUTs, link in description,
[5:15] that'll make your whole S-Log3
color grading experience
[5:18] so much easier and give you
perfectly accurate color
[5:21] in just one step.
[5:22] That's what I strive for with my LUTs.
[5:24] Check 'em out using
link in the description.
[5:26] Anyway, getting back to
this, I find that like, say,
[5:28] you know, like I've got a little
stubble on my face, right?
[5:31] If the edges of this
stubble aren't well defined,
[5:33] YouTube will kind of compress it more.
[5:35] But if you add a little bit of sharpening,
[5:36] and it gives it a bit of an
edge outline, then YouTube says,
[5:37] "Eh, don't compress that as much.
[5:40] Preserve those details."
[5:41] Now, the other one that
kind of surprised me,
[5:42] and one of the reasons why I
had to reevaluate this, is,
[5:45] I've always been trying to
make my exports more efficient
[5:48] using a better codec,
[5:51] finding ways to better
balance size to quality,
[5:54] and that kind of thing.
[5:55] And so the biggest disappointment for me
[5:57] was that H.264 looks better
on YouTube than H.265.
[6:02] Even though H.265 is more efficient,
[6:04] theoretically, you give them
both the same amount of bits,
[6:06] you'd think that H.265
would've a better image.
[6:09] I don't know what it is,
[6:10] but when you upload an
H.265 file to YouTube,
[6:13] it hits it harder than
it does an H.264 file.
[6:15] Another one that sucked for
me was don't use a quantizer.
[6:18] If you don't even know
what that word means,
[6:20] then maybe this isn't an
issue in the first place.
[6:21] But often, when you go
to your export settings,
[6:23] you'll have the choice
between constant bit rate,
[6:25] variable bit rate, and then
maybe it'll say something like,
[6:27] "Constant QP," or, "CQP,"
or something like that.
[6:30] That is the quantizer.
[6:31] It's the thing
[6:32] where you can set like
three different values.
[6:34] The closer to zero the value
is, the higher the quality,
[6:38] and the bigger the
number, the lower quality.
[6:39] So what I would do is, I
would change them one digit
[6:41] at a time until I could no
longer see a visual improvement.
[6:47] And the advantage is that they're
more efficient for file size
[6:51] than if you just sort of set,
[6:52] like, a really high-quality
variable bit rate.
[6:55] And I would dial that in perfectly.
[6:57] And I've been doing that
for the last like, you know,
[6:59] five, six months, dialing it in,
[7:01] and being really, really,
really happy with the export.
[7:04] And then I've been getting
comments lately of like,
[7:06] "Hey, Gerald, the quality
of videos is going down.
[7:08] Are you still uploading in 4K?"
[7:09] And I started to compare
the YouTube to my export,
[7:12] and yeah, it kind of doesn't
even look like 4K anymore.
[7:14] In the last couple weeks,
[7:15] I tried changing all the settings again.
[7:17] And if I don't use a quantizer,
if I don't use Constant QP,
[7:21] quality goes way up on YouTube.
[7:22] I think efficiency of bitrate
is not what YouTube wants.
[7:26] YouTube actually just wants more bits,
[7:29] and it tells it something about
like, "Do higher quality."
[7:32] But unfortunately, this
doesn't apply all the way up,
[7:34] because I also tried uploading
ProRes and DNX, you know,
[7:37] big files that aren't nearly
as compressed as H.264, H.265,
[7:40] that kind of thing.
[7:42] And there's like no noticeable gain
[7:44] over my optimal H.264 settings.
[7:47] But I also went the other way
and tried, "What about AV1?"
[7:49] And again, punished.
[7:51] Super efficient codecs, like
AV1, get punished by YouTube.
[7:53] Okay, now, let's talk about
the actual settings in your NLE
[7:56] that you can change
[7:57] to improve your YouTube
compression experience.
[8:00] Before we get into that,
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[9:06] This next one might be a bit of a placebo,
[9:08] but I also started testing
MP4 versus MOV files.
[9:12] It's marginal,
[9:12] but I feel like MP4 files
looked slightly better.
[9:16] And so I put this all
together, and then I started,
[9:18] so I started using MP4
H.264 variable bitrate
[9:22] with sort of high-quality tuning,
[9:24] and then I was just
increasing the bitrate
[9:26] like five megabits per second at a time
[9:28] until I could no longer see
anything better on YouTube
[9:33] when I uploaded it.
[9:34] And the highest bitrate
[9:37] to where I couldn't tell
the difference anymore
[9:39] was 45 megabits per second.
[9:41] And that's at 24 frames per second.
[9:42] If you shoot at a higher frame rate,
[9:44] so like 60 frames a second,
you're probably gonna want more,
[9:48] a higher bitrate.
[9:50] So I'll put all my
settings on the screen now.
[9:51] I use DaVinci Resolve, and I use NVENC,
[9:53] but I don't think either of
those things are important.
[9:55] I think what's more
important is the H.264 MP4
[9:58] with a variable bit rate, tuned highly,
[10:01] with the up to 45 megabits
per second for 4K
[10:05] at 24 to 30 frames per second.
[10:07] And you export out a file
[10:08] that is slightly more sharpened
than you'd want it to be,
[10:11] the YouTube quality will
be significantly different.
[10:14] This would surprise you,
[10:16] 'cause it's the same
shot, nothing's changed.
[10:19] I didn't, the scene, nothing,
the camera lens, nothing.
[10:21] And just look how mushy using
a quantizer in H.265 is,
[10:27] even though the file looks
better on my computer
[10:30] compared to the H.264
variable bit rate one.
[10:34] And if you add a bit of sharpness,
[10:36] man, does it look so much better.
[10:38] There is one other thing
that's worth trying
[10:40] if you're committed to
a scene that has a lot
[10:43] of those issues with production design,
[10:45] dark gradients and that kind of thing,
[10:47] based on dithering principles,
[10:48] I've seen mixed results personally,
[10:51] and from other videos that I've watched,
[10:52] of using like a film grain.
[10:54] Now, this requires a lot of finessing
[10:56] and is very scene-dependent,
[10:57] but if you've done all these things,
[10:58] and you're still getting
beat up pretty badly
[11:00] by YouTube compression
based on your scene,
[11:03] I would say try throwing
some film grain into the mix
[11:06] and see if that helps.
[11:07] I just hope this video was helpful.
[11:09] Like I said,
[11:09] it's been over a year of
me trying different things.
[11:12] And I finally have an image,
[11:14] which I think should be the
one you're looking at now,
[11:17] you know, based on my settings,
that I'm pleased with.
[11:21] Thanks for watching.
[11:23] Good luck with your YouTube uploads.
[11:26] Alright... I'm done.