Poor Quality of YouTube Processing

I am a relative newbie when it comes to video work. However, I have created and uploaded a video in the past and the rendered quality was quite acceptable (after a couple of attempts (Lever Park Trail - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZXvTErtniM)
In the past week I have been trying to upload footage that I recorded at the Gateshead Athletics Meeting last Sunday. No matter what quality I get from iMovie, YouTube renders absolute rubbish. I've tried various settings recommended on various forums to no avail.
Is YouTube now dead unless you are a big company trying to promote a product? Has anyone experience of other providers e.g. Metacafe?
Or a failsafe set of settings to create good quality movies which include fast action.

I have my own webspace but that is limited to 250MB and I use most of that for provisioning radio show podcasts on behalf of the presenters, so I don't have the spare capacity.

Yeah, it's just YouTube. Some videos can be viewed in quality, but the default resolution on YouTube is 640x480. I think if you have YouTube partnership it's higher. Sorry.

For YouTube you are only limited by the size of your file (1080 mb). Keep in mind that the site is re-compressing your video so that it works in their flash player. By uploading a high-quality video, YouTube will scale that down for you to fit the 640x480 aspect ration but it should maintain the quality of the picture (for the most part). What is the aspect ratio of your original file? What I try to do is keep it as large as possible (1080x720 usually) while staying just under the max file size. Export your vid as a Quicktime with a H.264 compression codec and you should be just fine.

I've used various tests - 640 x 480 is the maximum size I used. I expect it to work with H.264.
As I said earlier I've tried various settings based on recommendations posted around the web.
What is annoying is that I got acceptable quality back in June with a much longer video (just under 10 minutes). I think I'll resend that video (I use private setting when testing) and see what happens. I do think that YouTube has changed something possibly to offset the volume they receive.
Just done a search and I must have deleted the original .mov file that I generated - I suppose I thought I wouldn't need it again after a few weeks, having the original project files

I'll export to QT using 640x480, H.264, 30fps, key frames every 3 frames, best quality, multi-pass, auto data rate.
Sound is AAC mono 32bps, Fast Start for Internet Streaming

(I'm using iMovieHD - v5.0.2)

I have exported at 1024x768 but that created a file of 178MB which exceeds YouTube's limit, so second pass is at standard VGA resolution.

Now is acceptable quality, provided you go to the full YouTube player then switch to High Quality - I can't see the option when you view it from your upload area.

My video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLG2aUBwYOY

Looks SO bad. It is MUCH higher quality.... quite disappointed with iMovie.

It's very annoying. So far these solutions seem to be working.

BlueMac said:

Looks SO bad. It is MUCH higher quality.... quite disappointed with iMovie.

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I'm confused. WHY are you blaming iMovie?

Some of you might be interested in a couple of Guides I've put online. They are titled 'Preparing Video for YouTube' and 'iMovie Export Guide'.

GordonS said:

(Lever Park Trail - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZXvTErtniM)

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That video looked squished. I think you need to export it at 640x480 and preserve the aspect ratio so that you will get black bars on the top and bottom of the result. Or export the size in the appropriate aspect ratio and see if YouTube will work with that. Something like 640x360. What ever makes sense.

xstep said:

Some of you might be interested in a couple of Guides I've put online. They are titled 'Preparing Video for YouTube' and 'iMovie Export Guide'.

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Thanks - I did refer to your guides when testing - part of the problem is that YouTube provides two levels of quality: standard and high - but I can see only standard when initially uploading. BTW the video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed8d2JqBzcg

I'll look further at your guides as my 32 second video produced a 91MB file whereas my early video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZXvTErtniM&feature=user is almost ten minutes long yet I generated a quicktime movie of less than 100MB. Admittedly the action is not as fast as with the world's top sprinters but it doesn't seem to have much quality loss. Need to post the video of Asafa Powell running probably the world record for 100m in atrocious weather.

GordonS said:

Thanks - I did refer to your guides when testing - part of the problem is that YouTube provides two levels of quality: standard and high - but I can see only standard when initially uploading. BTW the video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed8d2JqBzcg

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I just watched it. In standard quality mode, the YT default, it seemed washed out. I then clicked the "watch in high quality" link just to the lower right of the video and the quality was nice. I could clearly make things out.

One note. I think you should add 1 or 2 seconds to the end.

xstep said:

I'm confused. WHY are you blaming iMovie?

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I'm not blaming iMovie.... or at least I didn't mean to come across as blaming it. I export directly from iMovie to Youtube.... so I'm not really iMovie, I'm just saying that it really compressed my movie when I exported it.

BlueMac,

I suggest you try the QuickTime export option as listed in my guide. You have much more control and eliminate the unknown export quality that occurs directly from iMovie to YouTube. Actually you can know the quality by digging to find the file in the "Movies/iMovie Projects/<projectName>.rcproject/Movies" folder.

Also, if your video on YT eventually lets you view it in high quality, check it out. There really is a big difference from the standard quality. I still think Vimeo does a better job with the re-encoding process.

Lastly, as a YouTube member, you can set for your account how you prefer to watch the playback of videos. After logging in, chose the Account link and More..., then under the Account heading select 'Video Playback Quality'. There you will see three options.

Forgive me for possibly a stupid question, but how do you set the video you've uploaded on youtube to have the option to play in high quality?

I don't think you can preset the quality choice for others to view high quality via YouTube. You can set it up though for you to view videos in HQ if you have an account. See this answer.

If the video has a high quality choice then on the YouTube page just below the right bottom of the video is a link that says "watch in high quality".

If you are placing the video as a link on your own page then you can add to the end of the link "&fmt=18". I think this story has enough information to understand that.

You could try uploading to another video hosting site such as Vimeo. Some of them will even allow you to upload and stream High Def video. Youtube really does suck in the quality department.