Blackmagic Forum

I'm having the hardest time getting my YouTube uploads to look clear. It seems like no matter what I try - as soon as I upload to Youtube the quality is terrible.



Here are my export settings.

Try changing the format to an mp4. If that is no better, export as ProRes HQ or equivalent and then convert to an mp4 h264 outside of Resolve (I remember having to do this for approval files so it might just be that Resolve doesn't encode h264 so well).

If that doesn't help then maybe something in your video is causing it to be compressed too much by YouTube, I don't have much experience in that regard but I hear that adding grain can help. By the same logic, denoising the footage (or performing some similar operation) would probably make things worse. Maybe adding a small amount of sharpening would help too, but you'll have to try these yourself, as I said I haven't much experience there.

Does youtube grab mean Resolve export with youtube preset or downloaded from youtube final video?

Final video will always have most of the grain/noise flatten- this is normal at youtube bitrates and nothing you can do about it. This grab doesn't look terrible as for final youtube quality. It's rather normal.
In order to send "good" master to youtube export ProRes and encode it with x264 based encoder- ffmpeg, Handbrake etc. This will give better start for youtube's own encoding. You can also raise Resolve restriction to eg 60Mbit, so it should produce better quality (but bigger file). Resolve h264 encoder is very average, so this is normal.