Export setting for Davinci Resolve to Youtube?

[Paul3221]

Hi,
I've been a photographer for many years, but I'm new to video. I've got a couple drones, and Sony full frame cameras that I've been using for video lately. My problem is that whatever I upload to Youtube looks like crap! It looks great on my PC when I export it, but when I try to share it on YouTube, it looks jittery, not sharp, and there are artifacts in clouds and water. Other people have drone videos that look great, so it must be something I'm doing. I have watched a number of videos on how to export. Most of them say to avoid the YouTube preset, and use H264 or H265 instead. My settings have been:

H264 or H265
MP4
2160p (4K)
limit bitrate to 80k - 100k (YouTube recommends 34K - 45K, but that looks even worse)

Here is one video I just uploaded. If you go to the 4th segment, you can see some real artifacts with the water, and the birds flying in the background
Big Sur Compilation

On this one, look at the marine layer as it passes the little peak, right in the top-middle. It's very jittery. It's also not sharp like it is on my PC.:
Sunrise at Green Valley CC

Thanks in advance!
Paul

 

[SethB]

…H264 or H265
MP4
2160p (4K)
limit bitrate to 80k - 100k (YouTube recommends 34K - 45K, but that looks even worse)

Please confirm that you are setting bitrate to at least 35M (megabits per second), not 35K (kilobits per second)

 

[Paul3221]

Here are my settings for the latest export. Isn't 120000 Kb/s the same as 120Mb/s?

 

[Paul3221]

I did an experiment, and just set the Quality to Automatic>Best. It seems to look just as good (if not better), and the file size is 2/3 the size. Not sure what is going on when I use the "Restrict to" option with a setting of 120000Kb/s. Maybe it's adding data to get to 120000?

 

[SethB]

It's taken me this long to get in front of a larger monitor.

No data would be added to get your clip to 120Mbps in a final export.

The first clip in your initial post is now "Private", can't see it. I'd be glad to review it again - I only saw it on a small iPad initially. The moving surf is a very challenging subject for an encoder, as is any footage in which every pixel is changing on every frame.

The second clip *mostly* looked good, except I was seeing some intermittent weird flickering in auto settings for YT playback. It was giving me 1440p/HD, but might have been automatically set lower at times. I didn't see the flickering when I manually set playback to 4k.

Your export settings show 24p as the output frame rate. There is a lot of misinformation out on the internet about the supposed goodness and filmic/cinematic qualities of 24p; many would insist that is a frame rate for all occasions. I strongly disagree, especially when it comes to doing fast motion and slow motion in outdoor scenes with a moving camera. Try it at 30p. Try it at 60p. What was your shooting frame rate? What was your timeline frame rate?

Have a look at your Youtube playback settings as well; have you manually selected 2160p/4k? Does your playback system support other 4k streams on YT?

 

[Paul3221]

Thanks for the feedback Seth, and taking the time to give it a serious look. I too noticed that Youtube playback set to auto was giving some weird effects. It looked a lot better when I manually selected 4K. I agree that 24fps is too low. I redid the golf course footage at 200% speed, and a lot of the noticeable jitter went away... ;-) I had recorded it at 4K/30, but for some reason, the timeline was set to 4K/24. I'm still figuring out video, and Davinci Resolve. I'll get there... ;-)

Here are the video's with the new settings in case you're interested:
Big Sur Compilation
Green Valley CC

Interestingly, the final segment of Big Sur still looks horrible in Auto resolution on YouTube, but looks pretty good set to 4K. Unfortunately I have no control over people's viewing settings.


Thank again for your input!

Paul