Photoshop Animation Render looks awful when uploaded to YouTube?

[fishfry123]

Hello,

For the past year I've been working on an animation. I do keyframes, inbetweens, and clean ups in Adobe Animate before dragging it into Photoshop to ink and color. Now when I export the animation and view the mp4 or mov file on my computer it looks fine. But when I upload to Youtube, whether its mov or mp4, or the presets are High Quality, Uncompressed, HD 1080p 24, or YouTube 1080p it looks awful on YouTube. The art looks very low quality and there are artifacts everywhere. I've tried 5 different uploads with different presets and they all look exactly the same, view them here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAEjr8yWFas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLpYX4a2MqM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E0MQc_0xFo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK8GXViAONo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwSRCqkIGss

If you somehow have trouble seeing it, try making it full screen. Mind you, all these versions look far better on my desktop. it's YouTube that is giving me issue.

My Render Video Presets are this:

Format: H.264/ Quicktime

Presets for H.264: High Quality, YouTube 1080p 29.97, HD 1080p 24

Presets for Quicktime: Animation High Quality, Uncompressed

Size: HDTV 1080p 1920x1080

Frame Rate: Docuument Frame Rate 24 fps

Field Order: Preset (Progressive)

Color Manage is turned on

Aspect: Document (1.0)

Range: All Frames

Alpha Channel: None

3D Quality: Interactive Open GL

I have no Idea what could be causing this. Please help me. I'm desperate.

[mglush]

Hi!

We are so sorry you are having this issue. Can you tell us what version of Photoshop you are using? Also, have you contacted YouTube's customer tech support to find out if they have any answers? If the files look perfect on your desktop, I am wondering if there is some setting that needs to be added or changed in YouTube.

Let us know--

Michelle

[fishfry123]

Im using Photoshop CC 2018 and I don't really know how to change the setting on YouTube before I upload. The only options are adding things like subtitles and end cards, I figure it has to be HD before its uploaded but as I said it looks fine on desktop.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Even though you are rendering out from Photoshop, I'd be inclined to start a similar thread in the Premiere Pro forum because I think there will be more people there with experience with dealing with YouTube compression artefacts.  I'm actually not sure if PremPro uses the same Media Encoder as Photoshop.

I'm sure you'l have done some research before starting this thread, so did you try searching with parameters like:

How to minimise YouTube compression artifacts?

The bottom line here is that YouTube's compression artefacts are well known, and a zillion people will have done their best to minimise them, so there will be answers out there.  FWIIW I thought your video quality was really good.  Are you seeing something different?

This Reddit suggests dark conspiracies are going on with favoured uploads getting reprocessed with less compression.  It's actually pretty amazing that the YouTube servers are even able to host the trillions of gigabytes of data they must hold.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/comments/bhpxgh/how_do_you_minimize_artifacts_due_to_compressi...

If you find any answers, or any information at all, please let us know.

[fishfry123]

I may have found a solution in case anyone else is facing a similar problem. I exported my animation as an Uncompressed .mov file from Photoshop then dragged it into Premiere. From there, I turned the Maximum Bitrate all the way up to 60 and exported as an mp4. Some scenes are a little pixelated and it has some issues with transparency but other than that it looks leagues better. If I find a better solution I'll be sure to update.

[mglush]

Great--I'm so glad you found out a solution that works! And Thanks for posting your findings--I know others will find it really helpful.

Following the process you outlined above, how big did your file turn out to be?

Michelle