Quality lose after uploading to youtube, info for my issue in post.

biomagical

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Sep 1, 2015
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To make it short I've been having a lot of problems when uploading my gameplay videos to youtube. The quality of the videos after I render is great but once I upload them they look HORRIBLE at 1080p.
HERE is a side-by-side comparison.

I have tried to look up vidoes and forum posts that explain the best render settings to use in Adobe Premier Pro CS6 and I've narrowed it down to the majority of content creators using H.264 with THESE settings.

The video there finished at 16.5 GBs. As far as I'm aware youtube can handle over 100 GB videos and can have 4k resolution videos so I can't seem to see why my videos would lose quailty when I am even using settings from other content creators when rendering!
 
Solution
If you rescale outside of premiere from a lossy format into another lossy format, you will suffer an extra round of quality loss, so you probably want to have premiere do the scaling. If you have premiere export into a lossless format, though, you can avoid that.

One thing I forgot to mention is that to get youtube to process your video into 1440p/4k streams, your video doesn't quite need to be at those resolutions. The threshold is actually at some intermediate resolution (so for example the one for 1440p is somewhere between 1080p and 1440p). I don't know what the thresholds are off the top of my head, but you can look it up. Not going all the way up to 1440p will save you some file size as well as some render/encode time...

aznricepuff

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Oct 17, 2013
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Well, that's pretty bad quality, even for youtube. I must ask, are you sure that when you took that screenshot, you were actually viewing the 1080p stream? It looks almost like a 360p stream to me.

That being said, you should keep in mind a few things:

Once uploaded to youtube, your videos will never look as good as the source. This is because youtube transcodes your videos into relatively low-bitrate streams. So you will inevitably suffer quality loss, no matter what you do.

Because of the above, it is way overkill to encode your 1080p videos at 160 Mbps. All you get is a really big file size and then youtube butchers the quality anyway when it does the transcode. Unless file size and upload bandwidth is absolutely of no concern to you, your bitrate target should be the lowest possible for visual transparency (for 1080p30 a good bet is going to be 25-35 Mbps for the premiere h.264 encoder, depending on how visually complex your videos are). If you do this, 99/100 people will not be able to tell the difference between a youtube stream transcoded from that and one transcoded from a lossless source.

Ever since youtube switched to vp9, it does this weird thing where when you initially upload a video, it will first transcode your video into h.264 and make that version available (the video will be flagged as 100% processed, available for viewing, and it will even show the HD tag once youtube finishes encoding the 720p+ streams). Some time after this, youtube will finish transcoding your video into the higher-quality vp9 codec, and once this happens, you will notice a significant increase in video quality. Youtube doesn't tell you when the vp9 encode finishes and it switches over from h.264; it happens automatically and the only way you can tell is by opening the "Stats for nerds" pop-up box in the video player. So if you notice your videos are of especially bad quality after they've been uploaded, this might be why.
 

biomagical

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Thanks for the info! I'm going to try what you've suggested and see how my new video turns outs. I'll edit this post with results in a few hours.
 

biomagical

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After the upload completed I left it for 4 hours to make sure it was REALLY finished processing. THIS is how it turned out compared to source. It's still very pixelly while the screen moves.
 

aznricepuff

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I agree it still looks pretty bad. But if there's rapid motion going on in that frame it might explain it - all modern video codecs will sacrifice per-frame image quality when there is rapid motion because when the video is playing normally it is much harder to notice the drop in quality.

Can you link me to the video itself? That way I can see for myself what the quality is like during normal playback and tell you if it's normal for youtube or if something else is going on.
 

aznricepuff

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Oct 17, 2013
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Yep, looks like normal youtube compression to me. Youtube's 1080p videos stream at a video bitrate of 2.5 Mbps (5 Mbps for 1080p60). That's really low, which makes for pretty bad image quality. If you want to see for yourself what kind of effect a bitrate this low can have on your videos, try re-encoding them at 5 Mbps with h.264 (I'm going to be generous here and give vp9 a compression ratio advantage of 50% over h.264) and then see what they look like.

If you want better quality on youtube, though, here's a tip: rescale your videos to 1440p (or even 4K) before uploading to youtube. Then when your video is viewed in 1440p or 4k mode (even if scaled down to fit on a 1080p monitor), it will look much better. It doesn't seem like it should work, but it does because the bitrates for 1440p and 4k streams (10Mbps and ~20Mbps, respectively) are disproportionately higher than the bitrate for 1080p streams.
 

aznricepuff

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Oct 17, 2013
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If you rescale outside of premiere from a lossy format into another lossy format, you will suffer an extra round of quality loss, so you probably want to have premiere do the scaling. If you have premiere export into a lossless format, though, you can avoid that.

One thing I forgot to mention is that to get youtube to process your video into 1440p/4k streams, your video doesn't quite need to be at those resolutions. The threshold is actually at some intermediate resolution (so for example the one for 1440p is somewhere between 1080p and 1440p). I don't know what the thresholds are off the top of my head, but you can look it up. Not going all the way up to 1440p will save you some file size as well as some render/encode time.

Someone suggested I try 2k but it adds an extra 8 hours to my render time...
Stepping from 1080p to 2k (2048x1080) should not blow up your render time like that - it's only 6% larger. Are you sure you didn't change some other setting(s) as well?
 
Solution