HELP: What export and preview codecs for high quality looking 4k Youtube export??

[tammyf22995666]

DESPERATELY NEED HELP:
After hours and hours of research I'm still struggling to determine what preview format to use??? Previously, I believe (not currently at computer to check) I used MPEG for preview (which only allows 1080p preview ) and h.264 for export.  I shoot on a Sony a7iii in 4k which is X avcs codec. I have been producing video for my parents business for less than a year.  This was going okay when making smaller videos, but as I have taken on bigger projects and developed my skills more, I am realizing my workflow is terrible causing export and render times to be very bad considering I use a 32gb i9 windows pc with 2080 rtx GPU. These videos are being upload mostly to YouTube, but we want a very high quality video.  I noticed when uploading in h.264 at 4k resolution it doesn't look the absolute greatest, and further more my export times are terrible. Should I be exporting and uploading with a higher codec or would the upload time be ridiculously long? Or should I use a different preview format codec that converts to h.264 faster and continue to export as h.264? I was hoping to use smart rendering, but it seems this is not possible with h.264 codec. PLEASE HELP!

[John T Smith]

Reading at YT may help Video and audio formatting specifications - YouTube Help

[Ann Bens]

Dont use preview files when exporting to H.264.

Previews are made up of i frame only mpeg which are of lesser quality.

Use a YT preset and up the bitrate.

[tammyf22995666]

Ann, I tried using a YouTube preset without preview files and it took an insanely long time as it has to rebuild everything.  I am look for a solution that would allow me to render while previewing throughout my edit process, but won't take quite as long when I finally go to export. Which is why I thought using a preview files would help speed things up, but I dont want to lose quality, so i thought of using a higher quality preview codec. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Tammy,

In addition to what Ann offered, you could render out your timeline to ProRes (set up in Sequence Settings), then export directly to ProRes (enable "Using Previews"). Finally, upload the ProRes master to YouTube. It will be of high quality, however, it will also take up a lot of drive space temporarily and will take longer to upload to YouTube. Might be worth a test.

Thanks,
Kevin

[tammyf22995666]

Kevin-Monahan my understanding was you can't get prores on a PC? In terms of the upload time to YouTube, how much longer are we talking? And would the increase in quality and decrease in export time be worth the additional upload time?

[rodneyb56060189]

I think you have to boil things down to basics at this point.

Does youtube show me 4k videos ?  I don't think I have that option and if I did my internet speed isn't fast enough to watch it anyway.

My TV and computer monitors are all full HD ( 1080p ). That's what I see. I think all the youtube things I've watched are 1080p at the highest resolution available from them.

So uploading 1080p FROM 1080P seems to be the best first choice you should make.

If you are going to upload 1080p that means you should export from editor 1080p for youtube.  So that's boiling it down to something manageable and fairly simple.

For example, if your source material is 4K you can start a project as 1080p and put the 4K stuff in a 1080p timeline.  Now you can zoom in and reposition stuff a little bit without losing quality … if your computer is powerful enough... and export 1080p.

The next step to boiling things down is more complicated cause it has to do with codecs. Specifically your source material codec (bitrate, subsampling, etc. ) AND what your NLE can do for you regarding

a) rendering, and / or proxies

b) export choices

As you noted it is rare that a PC can export prores.  Frankly, if you've been dealing with H264 all this time (source and project) it would be silly to export intermediate for EXPORT when it should have been transcoded to prores from the very beginning.

Sooooooo, the first choice is this:

Just because your camera can shoot 4k, does it make sense to shoot 4k if you are going to export 1080p anyway ???  The answer is YES, if you want to reposition and zoom in on a 1080p timeline. Otherwise it's kinda senseless in my opinion.

The next choice is more complicated... and has to do with what the codec is coming out of your camera ( probably H264 but who knows).

Please mention that when you get a chance.

[rodneyb56060189]

Probably stupid for me to mention this... but for ME I only had the option of h264 to a SD card in my DSLR. BUT, using HDMI out from the camera I can hook up an Atomos recorder, and record at a higher bit rate, go from subsampling of 4.2.0 to 4.2.2, and can record prores or DNxHD ( which is what I use for PC ).  The NLE is much happier with that than the H264.  The files are a bit larger, but it is NOT A BIG DEAL for me, cause I am not shooting for hours and hours at a time...( like a day long golf tournament ).   I just shoot 1 minute to 10 minute clips usually.  When necessary I can just xfer the files from the atomos SSD to another SSD and keep going … I have never reached the 1 terabyte limit where I've had to do that xfer on the fly.

[tammyf22995666]

Thanks for all the insight. My parents work in a very high end profession dealing with uh, clients that expect the best let's just say. And as 4k continues to gain more and more ground I seems that we are at a point were many platforms are seeing 4k become more and more norma .  Although I do agree that at this current moment 1080p is still the far more popular pick. But we prefer to be ahead of the curve and export at 4k as storage is not an issue.

I am shooting on the Sony a7iii which use x avcs codec at 100 mb/s in 4k

[rodneyb56060189]

I really don't think youtube delivers 4k for the general public stuff.. I think they experiment with 4k streaming for specific 'shows' but maybe you know more about that than me.  Most 4k TV's are taking 1080p and upscaling it to 4k internally ( within the electronics inside the TV ), and it looks pretty good from what I hear.

Anyway, that's not the point.. you want to be able to export 4k I guess.. and work in a 4k project and timeline.

I think you have to start thinking about 2 things... ( for the near future )…

1) get a 4k monitor (hopefully you can color calibrate, like eizo monitor or something ) for your primary monitor ( where you see your source and program "monitor" stuff in PPro ). Since color isn't an issue yet, that's kinda easy using adobe ( rec 709 ).

2) update computer stuff ( desktop stuff, with multiple drives way more ram and really powerful full sized graphics card with a lot of gpu mem )… cause you're gonna need it.

My PIG computer ( named in honor of prize winning ( blue ribbon) 'empress of blandings castle' ) has 32 gig and that is the MINIMUM requirement for resolve 15.  So it is not only the pig, but it is almost really a pig !

poor thing.

So when I do 4k I optimize ( proxy) the stuff.  Otherwise I'm doomed.

Good luck !

[excited_Genie16B8]

I really don't think youtube delivers 4k for the general public stuff.

YouTube has a LOT of 4K content that anyone can watch.

Of course, you need a 4K display to see it at that resolution.

[rodneyb56060189]

p.s.   I think the newer atomos recorders do 4k so maybe check that out... you can get away with 32 gig ram if you use a decent intermediate codec I think... worth looking at.  Don't know if your camera shoots S log and how the HDMI out would change that ...so something to research maybe.

??

[tammyf22995666]

Definitely. I will look into that.  Ya I have a 4k monitor 100%Adobe rgb with 32gb i9 processor using a RTX 2080 GPU. So I think I'm pretty well equipped lol

[rodneyb56060189]

good going !

[excited_Genie16B8]

I'm partial to exporting and uploading Cineform files for YouTube.

Choose the YUY 10 bit option under the QuickTime format.

[basil1891]

First, about Youtube and quality, things to be aware of.

YT is intended for speed, not for quality. It always recode videos you uploaded, and does it with "fast" settings and low bitrate. And it seems they decided that 1080p and below is for mobile screens only. 1080p usually encoded in ~1.5-2Mbps, of course it looks ugly on a bigger screen. 2160p and 1440p variants are OK more or less, not good really, but acceptable. So, even if your screen is only 1080, but you wanna see maximum quality - select 1440 in YT player.

I've heard that Vimeo is somewhat better, but never tested it myself.

Regarding rendering and export speed.

I assume you have enabled CUDA renderer in project settings. Then, in case your timeline is "yellow"  (means you are using only accelerated effects) and considering your HW, the export speed should be at least at realtime speed or faster. But, If your timeline is "red", and rendering is way too slow, try this trick I described recently:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2626976

To make export even faster, consider using HW-encoding via your graphic card. For that you need to install export plugin (freeware) :

https://github.com/Vouk/voukoder/releases/download/1.2.3/voukoder-1.2.3.zip.

Just copy "Voukoder.prm" file in the folder:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\7.0\MediaCore

Try this Voukoder settings:

Video tab => Match source, Nvidia NVENC h264, CQP16, RC lookahead 20

Multiplexer tab => Container:  QuickTime / MOV

(And don't update to v2 unless there is something that does not work)

p.s. Just a little reminder, when troubleshooting always use "New sequence from clip" method instead of creating the sequence manually.

[excited_Genie16B8]

1080p usually encoded in ~1.5-2Mbps, of course it looks ugly on a bigger screen.

I disagree.  I watch 1080 videos on my 84" 4k Home Theater screen all the time.  They can look quite nice.

4K does look better, of course.

[Warren Heaton]

Tammy:

Switch to an all Apple ProRes 422 (LT) or all GoPro Cineform 3 workflow and you should be good.  That is, convert all source footage to ProRes or Cineform, edit in ProRes or Cineform Sequences export ProRes or Cineform movies to an Adobe Media Encoder Watch Folder that's set to encode to H264.  Then, check the resulting H264 movie and upload to YouTube.

It'll be the difference of night and day for your workflow.

This was suggested earlier, I'm just adding this comment to reinforce it.

-Warren

[tammyf22995666]

Warren Heaton​ in order to do this, do i just set my sequence to the prores 422 setting? what does changing my sequence setting to prores 422 do? or are you saying to actually convert my source footage to prores 422 and then start editing in premier?

[Warren Heaton]

Hi Tammy:

Yes, convert all of your camera original footage to Apple ProRes422 (LT) and set your Sequence setting to Apple ProRes422 (LT).  When exporting, also export to Apple ProRes422 (LT) as an edited master.  Your edited master can then be used to generate whatever file you need for delivery (in this case an MP4 for YouTube).

You can use Adobe Media Encoder to transcode to QuickTime, but Adobe Prelude and Adobe Premiere Pro are also options.  (You may have noticed Premiere Pro's ingest preset to transcode to Apple ProRes422 (LT).  There's also one for Apple ProRes422.)

I usually create a folder called "Camera Originals", placing all of the videos that came from the camera(s) there and another folder called "Source Footage.  The second folder could be called "Transcodes" or "Media".

Important notes:

• You'll want to benchmark how long it takes your computer to transcode to Apple ProRes422 (LT) so that you can plan for this accurately on each project.  For example, if a 30-second clip takes two minutes to transcode, you can then extrapolate how much time you need to allow for 20 minutes to transcode.
• The Apple ProRes422 (LT) files will be large.  For 3840x2160 clips, I allow for 3GB per minute.  A 28-second MP4 camera original may come in at 336MB while the Apple ProRes422 (LT) version will be 1,280MB.
• You can swap out Apple ProRes422 (LT) for Apple ProRes422 or Apple ProRes422 (HQ), but since you're going to YouTube you are fine with LT. 

In your Premiere Pro project, drag and drop one of the transcoded movies onto the New Item icon to create your Sequence and immediately go to Sequence Settings to verify that you're at Custom QuickTime using Apple ProRes422 (LT) for your Video Previews.  Also, double-check the frame size of the Video Previews.  If at 1920x1080, you'll be able to work faster whenever you need to render the Timeline; however, you'll want to make sure "Use Previews" is disabled when you export later when you want full resolution renders in your edited master.  Of course, you could set Video Previews to 3840x2160 for slower renders while editing and then enable Use Previews for faster export later.

-Warren

[Media Editor]

I upload my videos to wetransfer.com.    You get 2GB free.  You can send the files through e-mail.  We Transfer has a link for you to send  the videos. The video files are not reincoded like YouTube and Vimeo.

[Ann Bens]

Wetransfer is a up and download service.

Is totally different from YT or Vimeo.

[Warren Heaton]

Tammy, have you gotten anywhere with your issue?