Lost Video Island

[Shirley Parker]

Many of my video maker friends complained lately about youtube quality and while I uploaded my last work I could help but notice how horrible indeed it is lately. I saved my video on mpg 1 (I used Sony Vegas) and I really wanted to make it a tad better. Does anybody knows how I can do it?
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*It always stays the same*

[lan-di]

[Shirley Parker]

Thanks for your answer. It sucks 'cause in my computer it didn't even have this option. It is just heartbreaking to see how bad this seems on youtube... something that recently got worse and worse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEJbmXxiRPU

It is saddening 'cause I spent a great deal of time and I see some videos are not sucking quality wise and they are more complex than mine. Can it be because of the number of times we render? On Sony Vegas can it interfeer with the quality?
_________________
*It always stays the same*

[lan-di]

[Shirley Parker]

Thank you very much. I think this time I will have to deal with the fact yourube screwed majorly with my video and try on more months to make another version of this song.

But your information was very useful. Thank you very much.
_________________
*It always stays the same*

[elvira]

No, you really shouldn't be editing in XviD in Vegas, or any other editor.

This link explains why XviD (also DivX, WMV, etc) editing can cause problems. I know I've experienced some of these issues:
http://aquilinestudios.org/DivX_Editing.html

And another link (which talks about Adobe Premiere, but the same principle applies to Vegas or any other video editor). http://www.pacifier.com/~jtsmith/ADOBE.HTM#edcf

The problem with XviD, DivX or other compressed formats is that they are compressed. Not only is the quality not all that great, but not every frame is a keyframe. As the link above (about Premiere) explains, it's like working with something that is fan-folded, rather than flat. Not every frame has the whole picture in it, so your editor has to work hard to try to re-create the whole frame. It makes editing dodgy.

Look at this tutorial, and scroll down to #5, "Interframe Compression" to see an explanation about not every frame being complete: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/video3.htm#4

I realize that a lot of vidders are going to continue to edit in XviD because they think it's convenient or whatever, and there's nothing stopping a vidder in editing in whatever they like the best. But it can cause big problems for some vidders, and is not recommended by professional editors (as well as high profile vidding tutorial sites like a-m-v.org), as the links above explain.

This video by my friend sooth (sorry, not a Lost video, it's from BBC Robin Hood) was edited in Sony Vegas, and the clips she used for editing were DV AVI (converted from the DVD). I believe she uploaded a high quality H.264 MP4 file to YouTube. The YouTube quality at "regular" is about as good as you're going to get, because Youtube sucks. (We all know it!) If you look at the higher quality version of the video, you'll see it looks a lot better. If you download the H.264 MP4 or XviD AVI version of the video (she's got a link in the video info) you'll see that the quality is very nice indeed. (Though she made an error and did not export her video out as "progressive," so there is some slight interlacing. She won't be doing that next time! )

There's a limit to how good a YouTube video can look, but if you upload a higher bitrate (I'd say a bitrate of 1300 or above) video, use a modern codec (XviD, DivX, H.264 are good) and you edited your video with good quality clips (avoiding editing compressed footage when possible) then it'll look the best it can possibly look, considering that we're talking about YouTube here.

[lan-di]

Τhat's exactly what i said about XVID and compression. The episodes we're downloading are in XVID format. When you cut a clip and save it with Direct Stream Copy method, you get 100% of the quality you had before, but if you compress it again with XVID codec... even if you set larger bitrate, you loose quality during process.

About the keyframes you're right. XVID keyframes are every 40msec.

[elvira]

Well, there is a technically "wrong" way. Vegas isn't really meant to edit XviD. XviD is a delivery format, not an editing format, and no amount of "but I like it" will change that. It isn't optimal to edit highly compressed footage (which is what XviD is) in any video editor. If it was, the professionals would be editing in XviD, and they usually don't. They edit in DV or some other format where every frame is a keyframe.

However, it doesn't change the fact that everyone will use what they like. All we can do (and that sites like a-m-v.org can do) is inform people of the way it is. Whether vidders choose to take the advice is another matter. I can understand why some vidders wouldn't, if they didn't think they were having any problems with their current routine. (Though I have found that many times, a vidder won't recognize XviD editing as the culprit to their problems. They'll say that their editor doesn't "like" AVI files, when in reality, it doesn't want to edit XviD AVI.) But anyway, if a vidder doesn't think they're having a problem editing with XviD, then they probably won't change, and that's understandable.

Since I do a lot of my video work on the Mac, I soon learned that it was fighting a losing battle to try to edit XviD AVI. Final Cut complains mightily when I try. I've learned to convert everything over to DV MOV first (even downloaded footage) and the end result looks okay.

When converting DVDs (and I assume that all of us vidders want to buy the DVDs to our favorite shows when they become available) it doesn't make a lot of sense to convert to XviD AVI for editing. The picture quality will be so much better if we convert to a lightly compressed format, or even an uncompressed format.

If you look at sooth's video (I linked to in my previous post), the downloadable versions look very nice, and that's because she edited in DV AVI (lightly compressed codec) rather than XviD, which she used to use. She says she really notices the difference now.

[desmondwatch]

Like lots of folks, I've noticed that my vids play back with lots of hitches and artifacting on YouTube and Imeem. I've just been editing with iMovie and throwing up the resulting M4V files up there, but I've just begun experimenting with MPEG Streamclip. I thought MP4 might produce the highest quality, but I was wondering if there was a better format? Maybe the most compatible with youtube's default video format would lose less under compression?

The formats Streamclip offers are:
Quicktime
DV
AVI
AU
MPEG-4
DV Stream
3G
AIFF
Wave
Image Sequence

There are even more than that. Actually, it's kind of overwhelming. I don't even know if these are all video files! I'm sorry, I feel so dumb!

[elvira]

The MP4 container or MOV container with the H.264 codec ("compression" in drop-down menu in MPEG Streamclip) with a data rate or bitrate of 1500 or above should look pretty good. I once uploaded a MOV file (H.264 codec) with a 1000 bitrate and I was very disappointed with the quality on YouTube. 1500 looks better.

I don't pretend to know the perfect combination for Youtube or imeem, but so far my own videos look respectable, because I usually upload my "broadband" copies, which have a bitrate of at least 1500. (If I can manage it, I go up to 2000.)

[desmondwatch]

Thanks for all your advice, Elvira. It's really been invaluable.

Now though I've noticed an interesting dilemma. For my last vid, I just racked up the quality on Streamclip as high as I could get it, and I've noticed, as someone else mentioned, the characters "doing the robot"

It wasn't world-ending since it didn't affect the beat-matching, but I never had this problem with the pixelated crap quality vids. So I was wondering, anyone who cared to offer their input: Which would you take: poor quality graphics with high frame-rate, or cleaner images with slowdown?