David_Harry
Captain
United Kingdom
Offline
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Hi.
Here's a few points that may help.
YT will compress everything that you upload, there are no exceptions.
HD and below will be h.264, above will be VP9
Both YouTube's h.264 and VP9 are inter-frame codecs and will both suffer similar issues.
Although you won't get better quality from VP9 it will look subjectively better than h.264 at lower bitrates at the same resolutions due to it being more efficient, similar to h.264 VS h.265
Because you are using destructive inter-frame, lossy, compression with h.264 with your Action files and so is YouTube with its output, you need to feed YouTube an intermediate master that doesn't degrade between you and YouTube.
For the least amount of encoding artefacts in your final YT output you should use an intra-frame codec as your intermediate master. This will reduce artefacts but will not get rid of them completely.
You can also use an intra codec that uses lossless compression, you don't have to use uncompressed. Things such as HQX, HQ, DNX, ProRes etc. at the appropriate settings.
These files will all be very large compared to the original files.
If you've only shot HD, stay HD. Upressing to 4K to fool YT is a bit of a myth, you'll likely loose more information in the uprez compared to what you'll gain at the YT end. If you know enough about upacaling and what algorithms to use for specific motion characteristics, maybe give it a try as you may notice a slight difference in heavily compressed detailed blocks, but highly unlikely.
In the case of Osmo Action footage you'll never see any similar footage to yours looking any better if you flollow my intermediate suggestion. All the problems are in the original footage. These are problems due to the compression method and not the camera, these problems simply get worse with subsequent lossy encodes.
If you ever see footage similar to your own with an Osmo Action that looks better in areas that break up, macro-blocking, and you've followed my upload workflow, it's likely that the master has had a slight blur applied to help with the YT encode.
If you ever see amazing looking footage on YouTube, not actioncams etc. This is likely to be professional cameras shooting uncompressed, YUV, RAW, or a lossless codec and then uploaded from a similar intermediate master.
Bottom line. The vast majority of footage shot is using inter-frame compression, phones, actioncams etc. They all have issues to a certain degree and all need treating in a certain way to get the best out of them. Unfortunately there's no short cuts and huge file uploads are always going to be needed.
The only way around this is to either just upload the Osmo Action files 'as is' which will be the best quality upload. Or use an NLE that smart renders back to the original codec parameters for cuts only editing.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Dave.
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