These whales are not for Youtube. Media Encoder preset needed for better quality.

[tuilorraine]

A few days ago, I was out on a boat with a scientist filming orca (killer whales). I got about an hour of footage which I edited in Premiere Pro, down to 11½ minutes of superb scenes of these beautiful animals literally dancing in time to Strauss's Blue Danube which I set it to. They were often right beside or even beneath our boat.

I cannot just put the footage up on Youtube as I normally would with nice footage. There are several important reasons why not and one of them is that because I was filming from an official orca research boat, the scientist herself owns the intellectual rights to the footage taken on her boat.

So I want to upload it to her special website where she requests us to send it.

Normally I just choose the Youtube preset in Media Encoder because with everything else, I mostly intend to upload everything to Youtube.

But this time I want it to be of better quality than the usual Youtube video. I'm hoping the quality is the same as what I see in my own home computer when viewing the MP4 before processing.

What Encoder preset ought I to use? I'd like it to be an MP4, mainly because I know that works for her on her website where we post them.

[emilyks1224]

If the 4k youtube or vimeo preset under the H.264 format isn't good enough, you should check out this thread and see if it helps: CreativeCOW 

[David Arbor · Accepted solution]

You can always up the bitrate of any preset, or also try the Adaptive Resolution-High preset.

Any of the H.264 presets, however, are going to be using the MainConcept encoder that Adobe licenses. If you're looking for a better encode, rather than more data, check out x264, which is an open source encoder for H.264. You can find this in tools like Handbrake. The quality settings work differently there where you have a RF number, but you can also choose a bitrate. You can get comparable quality to the MainConcept encoder at a lower bitrate, or even higher quality at the same bitrate you might have been choosing before, such as the 16 Mbps in the YT preset.