Personally, I have custom export presets for H.264. In them, I tend to reference YouTube's encoding specs for bitrate, and then exceed them. For example for 1080p30 SDR footage my target bitrate is 18 Mbps (YT reccommends 8 Mbps) for 2160p30 SDR I use 55 Mbps (YT reccommends 35-45 Mbps) Here's a FANTASTIC article from the folks at Frame.io: https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/15/choose-the-right-codec/#codec-export At the end of the day you have to realize that whatever you upload, YouTube (and most other sites) will compress again. We're all playing by YouTube's rules at the end of the day. So this is why you want to upload as high as reasonably possible, which will allow YT's encode to maintain as much of the original quality as possible. Now the million dollar question is "Why not just upload ProRes?" and to be honest, it is the theoretical best approach (even the article above reccommends this). You can upload a ProRes copy on sites that support it and it will be the best possible quality you can maintain before it gets encoded again by YT. That said, while the answer is theoretically "it's the best", the issues that arise are more philosophical in nature: Is it worth that significantly longer upload time? Is it worth that extra processing time? Is it worth needing to create both a ProRes AND an H.264 version down the road anyway for platforms that don't support ProRes or for clients who wouldn't know what to do with it? And this is where I personally deviate from the article's advice (despite it being an amazing article). My own personal take on this (and is by no means gospel) is "no". I don't think those inconviencnes are worth the potentially indistinguishable difference between a ProRes master and an H.264 encode that overshoots the bitrate reccommendation. But then again, my workflow and delivery needs may be different than yours. At the end of the day, consider what's best for your workflow. If you're going straight from export to YouTube and that's it and having an upload fail due to a connection issue uploading a massive file is of not concern, then you may wish to go ahead and upload a ProRes master OR a very high bitrate (ex. 50Mbps CBR for 1080p) H.264. If you want a file that also can be sent to clients or other people and ensure the file size is optimized though I reccommend something like what I mentioned, H.264 that exceeds what social media sites ask for, but also not unreasonably large. In this space there is usually not one "correct answer" rather, there's the answer that's best for you and your workflow.
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