Standard definition footage and Youtube

[Geoffrey]

Hi,

I am working on some old standard definition material (DV PAL 25fps). The quality is low but decent enough for my purposes so I did some editing, colour correction, rendered and uploaded to Youtube. The video that YT published however is awful, not only much worse quality (fuzzy, blocky), the colourspace is quite different - really dark and faces are very red (from pretty natural looking in the original rendered file).

I am used to YT messing things up sometimes but this is awful. I tried various things but none with much success. Initially I rendered it as H.264 with a decent bitrate and the rendered video looked fine but YT treats this worst of all and the upload is unusable, especially regarding the colourspace which is the most red and dark. So tried rendering out as the original format (PALDV) and uploading that. It was lighter (but not enough) but the image quality drops noticeably from the rendered file. I tried adjusting the overall gamma which helped up to a point but it still looks all wrong. Colour space in Premiere sequence is Rec. 709.

Maybe YT is just no good for SD material these days but has anyone any experience how to improve things? Maybe render out as HD? Not much experiences in upresing.

[newfoundmass]

Definitely render it out to 1080p. It will get a significant bit rate boost. 

[kye]

23 minutes ago, Geoffrey said:

Hi,

I am working on some old standard definition material (DV PAL 25fps). The quality is low but decent enough for my purposes so I did some editing, colour correction, rendered and uploaded to Youtube. The video that YT published however is awful, not only much worse quality (fuzzy, blocky), the colourspace is quite different - really dark and faces are very red (from pretty natural looking in the original rendered file).

I am used to YT messing things up sometimes but this is awful. I tried various things but none with much success. Initially I rendered it as H.264 with a decent bitrate and the rendered video looked fine but YT treats this worst of all and the upload is unusable, especially regarding the colourspace which is the most red and dark. So tried rendering out as the original format (PALDV) and uploading that. It was lighter (but not enough) but the image quality drops noticeably from the rendered file. I tried adjusting the overall gamma which helped up to a point but it still looks all wrong. Colour space in Premiere sequence is Rec. 709.

Maybe YT is just no good for SD material these days but has anyone any experience how to improve things? Maybe render out as HD? Not much experiences in upresing.

The main quality issue will be that you're uploading SD files, which YT thinks should be delivered at an ultra-low bitrate.

I suggest exporting at 1080p, with a healthy bitrate.  The traditional wisdom is to upload at 50+Mbps, but as your content is SD, a lower bitrate would probably be visually similar.

In terms of the colour space, it's a little trickier, and the TLDR is to try and export using Rec709-A if that's available to you, otherwise you could try Rec709 and the different gammas (e.g. Rec709/Gamma2.4 or Rec709/Gamma2.2 etc).  Unfortunately, it is very common for platforms to either not properly support colour management or have bugs.  I suggest a bit of googling to get specific instructions on FCPX and YT, there should be some good advice out there.

[Geoffrey]

Thanks all, rendering at 1080p has pretty much solved the problem, even the colour issue (though could still be tweaked).

[ac6000cw]

Another thing with YouTube, if your source material is 25 or 50 fps, is that only 720p and higher playback resolutions support those frame rates, so to get a source-matching playback fps you have to upload at a minimum of 720p (but I'd suggest 1080p like Kye has).

For PAL DV, I normally use FFmpeg to de-interlace (using 'estdif'), upscale, sharpen and encode to H264 1080p 50fps files before I edit it. Because (by today's standards) DV tends to be horribly noisy, you need to use a decent bitrate to keep the H264 1080p quality decent - otherwise the noise creates too many compression artefacts.

[fuzzynormal]

I’d say even try up-rez’ing it to 4k and then upload. See how YouTube handles that one. 

[ac6000cw]

12 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

I’d say even try up-rez’ing it to 4k and then upload. See how YouTube handles that one. 

Yes, I usually do that just to get decent looking 1080p when it's played, irrespective of the original source material.

In case anyone is interested, this is an example FFmpeg command line to process 4:3 PAL DV into 1440x1080p H.264 at 20Mbps using the Intel QSV encoder (command should be all on one line, input=PAL_DV.avi, output=PAL_DV_1080p.mp4):

ffmpeg.exe -i PAL_DV.avi -vf estdif,scale=1440x1080:flags=lanczos+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int+full_chroma_inp,unsharp -c:v h264_qsv -preset veryslow -b:v 20M -c:a aac -b:a 256k PAL_DV_1080p.mp4
 

[Clark Nikolai]

I developed a technique that works well for this. Basically it's to upres it to HD and do a smart deinterlace. This way you control the deinterlace and uprezzing instead of them. (I use Final Cut for this but probably any NLE would work.) There are probably several ways to do this but here is my method.

-Duplicate footage outside of Final Cut. Bring both in.

-Put one copy in an HD progressive timeline. (Same frame rate.)

- Lay the other copy above it.

- Turn down the audio of one of them.

- On the lower one, in FCP inspector, check Deinterlace and choose the Field Dominance Override to Lower.

- On the upper one, do the same but set the Field Dominance Override to Upper.

- On the upper one, set Opacity to 50%.

- Output to ProRes and make your H.264 from that.

 

Some notes:

This method blends the two fields together. Most footage should look good but if the shutter speed was set very high at the time of shooting there'll be a double image.

This will of course be pillar boxed in a 16:9 frame.

[Clark Nikolai]

Another thing that might help is to upload to YouTube as a ProResLT file. That way YouTube isn't re-encoding from an MP4 but from a ProRes file. It'll take longer to upload but if quality is important then it's worth the time.

And type of ProRes will work but I suggest using the LT flavour as it's the smallest file size that's visually lossless.

 

[dew075732]

I am used to YT messing things up sometimes but this is awful. I tried various things but none with much success. Initially I rendered it as H.264 with a decent bitrate and the rendered video looked fine but YT treats this worst of all and the upload is unusable, especially regarding the colourspace which is the most red and dark. So tried rendering out as the original format (PALDV) and uploading that. It was lighter (but not enough) but the image quality drops noticeably from the rendered file. I tried adjusting the overall gamma which helped up to a point but it still looks all wrong. Colour space in Premiere sequence is Rec. 709.
 

[gt3rs]

Render it in 4k, youtube will compress less. Try it yourself, upload at 1080 and at 4k the same 1080 video and you will see. 

[Michael S]

My guess is that youtube under some circumstances ignores metadata but makes assumptions based on resolution like "if resolution = SD then input color matrix = rec601" and then does a conversion to rec709 behind the scenes, or it doesn't but it will still be interpreted as rec709 by the browser. My experience with video software is that you can't trust any of it to actually follow the standards and respect all metadata.

If you create a video in a "modern" format (HD, rec709) it is most likely to show up correctly. Old formats (SD, interlaced) are often poorly supported.

Maybe this link will put you on the right path: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/329866-incorrect-collor-display-in-video-playback#post2045830