Northern Michigan Clip + Quality Question

[larawaym]

This is a quick video I pieced together over the weekend. While I love showing off the video & beautiful scenery, I would like your input on the video quality.

This was shot on a P2V+ in 1080p/30 and edited in Premiere Pro. Export settings were h.264 1080p 29.97fps 40Mbps. It seems like there are a lot of compression artifacts in the video. Does anyone have recommendations on a video output format that isn't mutilated by youtube? I see a lot of videos that look much much better than mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wjvYILh-U

Thanks!

 

[RedRyderMedia]

Hard to tell what you're seeing and commenting on. Can you be more specific and at what point of the video.

I'm viewing on an iPad Air with Retina display and a fast internet connection. I saw some issues with the appearance of the water at about the 40-50 second point. I think that may be related to the camera. It seems to flash and tile. I find using fixed setting on the camera work better than allowing it to change with auto settings. I've had some of those same effects filming at the beach.

 

[4wd]

It looks OK to me, there's no need to use 40bits when rendering, the original material is only about 12.
I set it on 10 with peaks of 20 allowed. This will process much quicker and size for uploading much less.
In the rendering screen look at the blur tab.
I like to set that on 1 or 2, it seems to smooth out the phantom footage tendency to be oversharpened/too much USM.

I find youtube playback with the phantom often looks better at 480 in a smaller window (they call it theater mode) - rather than going full 1080 or even 720.
It just smooths things a bit at lower resolution and you see less artifacts.
Also it seems to look far better viewed on a tablet than laptop or desktop, not quite sure why that is but suggests what people are seeing varies enormously depending on how well the device handles relatively low-res video

 

[InterMurph]

The only place I saw problems was at 0:08, when the man walks the dock towards the cottage. That is a very dark scene, so I would guess that the camera just didn't have enough light. The P2V+ camera just isn't that good.

If you haven't do so already, you should switch the camera's sharpening setting to 'Soft'. This tells the camera to apply the least amount of (destructive) sharpening in camera, and lets you do it in Premiere Pro. The Premiere Pro 'Sharpen' effect does a decent job, and let you preview the footage in real time. The 'Unsharp Mask' effect produces superior sharpening, but at the cost of laggy and skipping previews.

And 4wd is correct; 40 MB/second just wastes time and space. When exporting for YouTube, I use 12 MB/second as the target rate, with peaks of 16 MB/second.

 

[larawaym]

Great- thanks for all your input! The youtube compression certainly doesn't help. I'll be switching to soft sharpening and give that a try and also took your advice on lowering bitrate. As you said, there was no noticeable quality loss at lower rates.

I'll give it another try this weekend. Thanks again!