It ain’t gonna look good at 3 mbps.

john_dennis wrote on 7/24/2014, 8:41 PM

In my role as “grandpa in the stands with a camcorder” I find myself shooting a lot of undulating water at swim meets in the summer. After a number of uploads to youtube where I was ashamed of the results that I shared with family members, I decided to look at my methods for rendering and uploading to streaming services. I reached the conclusion that in some cases: 1) It ain’t me. 2) It ain’t Vegas Pro. 3) It ain’t Handbrake.

Sooner or later, we have to face the fact that some types of video are never going to look good at the bit rate that youtube returns, ~3 mbps.

Here is one type of scene that I shoot a lot that falls into that group, undulating water.

Just for yuks, here is the Vimeo version.

https://vimeo.com/101687395

The source video looks fine to me. My Blu-ray renders at 25 mbps look just fine to me. I rendered to the Mainconcept AVC codec for Internet upload at various bit rates in increasing 1 mbps increments but lost interest when I found that the bit rates that yield acceptable results were far above the bit rate that youtube will ever return to me.

So, here’s the deal.

If some of you are up for the challenge of proving me wrong and want to try your hand with your secret method of encoding for streaming, knock yourself out with this source file. (Link long since abandoned. See 2016 Update).

2016 Update: I found a Canon utility for the camera that allowed me to cut the video on I-frames without re-compressing. Here is link to a 20 second video identical to the original but not such a burden to store and download.

If you’ve been there, done that and have examples of other types of scenes that you would never consider uploading to a streaming service, please post them in this thread and save others a lot of frustration.

Hope your summer is just as happy as mine has been so far.

John Dennis

I'll add links to on-going efforts below:

youtube from the camera video

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Comments

VidMus wrote on 5/12/2015, 9:19 PM

I shoot most indoor videos with a shutter speed of 30 instead of 60. This allows the exposure to be 1 stop less in gain which helps reduce noise, especially in low to very low light.

Not ideal for fast motion but helps a lot with reducing the noise in low light.

Of course, I always set the AGC limit to not let the gain get any higher than a set amount. This is very important!

Just one of the needed compromises with video.

john_dennis wrote on 12/29/2016, 4:03 PM

I found this exercise so instructional at the time that I've updated it:

1) Included a 20 second original camera media cut without re-compression with a Canon I-frame only cutter (Image Browser EX 1.5.2).

2) Updated the graphics hieroglyphics to the current formatting.

Musicvid wrote on 12/29/2016, 5:46 PM

YouTube imposes a bitrate ceiling, called vbv.

In order to stream with less stuttering and controllable bandwidth, the burst bitrates needed to play water in motion are simply not available. There are no cheats available that I'm aware of. You can literally throw the kitchen sink at YT and not see a noteworthy difference.