---
title: 'Beat the Compression! How to Get Better YouTube Uploads'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=DI1BjkmVhTg'
video_id: 'DI1BjkmVhTg'
date: 2026-06-16
duration_sec: 0
---

# Beat the Compression! How to Get Better YouTube Uploads

> Source: [Beat the Compression! How to Get Better YouTube Uploads](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DI1BjkmVhTg)

## Summary

The video explains how to optimize video exports for YouTube to minimize compression artifacts, covering set design, codec choices, and export settings. The creator shares personal experiments and recommends specific settings for better quality.

### Key Points

- **Avoid Dark Gradients** [01:16] — YouTube compresses dark gradients heavily, causing banding and artifacts. Light gradients are less problematic.
- **Bright Scenes Reduce Face Detail** [03:06] — A brighter scene with more elements spreads bits evenly, reducing detail on the subject's face compared to a dark scene.
- **Over-Sharpen for YouTube** [04:35] — Slightly over-sharpening footage before upload results in better sharpness after YouTube's compression.
- **H.264 Beats H.265 on YouTube** [05:57] — H.264 looks better than H.265 on YouTube despite H.265 being more efficient, as YouTube compresses H.265 harder.
- **Avoid Quantizer (CQP) Settings** [06:17] — Using a quantizer (Constant QP) leads to worse YouTube quality; variable bitrate with higher bitrate is better.
- **MP4 vs MOV** [09:06] — MP4 files may look slightly better than MOV files on YouTube, though the difference is marginal.
- **Optimal Bitrate for 4K 24fps** [09:34] — 45 Mbps is the optimal bitrate for 4K at 24fps; higher frame rates require higher bitrate.
- **Film Grain as a Last Resort** [10:38] — Adding film grain can help mask compression artifacts in problematic scenes, but requires finesse.

### Conclusion

By using H.264 MP4 with variable bitrate, over-sharpening, and avoiding quantizers, you can significantly improve YouTube video quality. Set design also plays a crucial role in compression outcomes.

## Transcript

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