Remember when Neil Armstrong said this?

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for video clarity”

OK. Me neither. But if he’d stepped out of a time machine instead of the Lunar Module and one of the most blurry videos in history, he might have.

Today is the biennial release of our continuing series on how to get your videos looking and sounding all sparkly-like online.

And in the last 2 years, there’s been an awful lot of media convergence, so with the right preparation, your videos can now shine on any screen, from the smallest phone to the largest TV.

Here’s the “how” of it…


To download Handbrake:
https://handbrake.fr/

    23 replies to "How to Make Your Video Upload Crystal Clear"

    • Geoff Marlow

      Thanks Steve – very useful

      I’m using Vegas Movie Studio and have been using MusicVid10’s advice here (from 2.58 onward) for the past few years. Clearly switching to H.265 is now the way to go, but I’m wondering whether the advice at 3.44 about using the Avid LE 2.3.4 codec is still valid as it’s almost seven years on… (I’m shooting 1920 x 1080 at 29.970 fps from a Canon Digital SLR (EOS 600D). Any thoughts?

      Best wishes, Geoff

      • Steven Washer

        Ultimately it’s how the video looks and behaves on different screens, Geoff. So if you’re happy with the results and if your viewers are also happy, then I would gradually, at your leisure, move over to the new codec.

        Eventually we’re all going to be here, so it will be good to be ready when the old Avid codec is considered officially obsolete.

    • michael krisa

      Hey Steve great tutorial!

      I have been using the PC version of handbrake for years.

      Under Dimensions i tried but tried the settings you recommended 3840 x 2160 but it keeps defaulting back to 1920 x 1080 🙁

      Is this a PC thing?

      Thanks,
      michael

      • michael krisa

        BTW I am running the most recent version 1.1.0 – 64 bit

      • Steven Washer

        Well, Handbrake will not allow you to create a larger version of a video than it already is. So if you’re working with 1920 x 1080 now, that’s as high as you can go.

        • Scott

          Ahhh… I just shot you an email with a similar question. This answer it… Yes, shooting a larger video.

    • Scott

      Interesting… I just used the codec h265 (x265)… Plays audio only with a blank screen.

      • Steven Washer

        Yep. It’s quite possible that could happen if the video format is not one that Handbrake recognizes.

      • Steven Washer

        Tried to email you back, Scott, and got an undeliverable message. 🙁
        Will do something on the square video soon. 🙂

    • nancy dadami

      Thank you Steve. I have been using Camtasia for several years….how does it compare to handbrake?

      • Steven Washer

        Camtasia does have a 1-click sharing capacity, and it produces an MP4. So if you and your viewers are happy with it, then there’s no need to fix what ain’t broken. 🙂

    • Shama

      This is very interesting, but also kind of depressing for me. 🙂
      I have spent 8 years of my life creating videos for my training academy which are all in 1280×720, and there is no way to make them any bigger. I have literally hundreds of videos in this format, and to remake them all, I had to wait for my next incarnation! Maybe I will rename my business the “dinosaur academy”. 🙂

      • Steven Washer

        Aw, Shama. It’s not that bad. All you do is make your next batch at the larger size.
        It’s evolution, not Videous Rex. 🙂

        • Shama

          So what happens when all my videos are in h.264 format? Will they stop working at some point in the future or not play right? Should I re-render them in h.265?

          • Steven Washer

            H.264 is fine and will continue to be fine for a long time. The reason is that it is closely associated with the MP4 wrapper. Not to get too technical here, but the internet loves that wrapper. Even after everyone has adopted H.265, we’ll still be uploading MP4’s, so don’t worry. Your current library will last quite a bit longer.

            • Shama

              But still from now on I should encode all new mp4 videos in h.265, right?

            • Steven Washer

              For a number of reasons, yes. Smaller file sizes, better quality, and future-proofing are 3 good ones.

    • Shama

      Hmm, strange things happening with h.265. I converted one video into h.265, uploaded it to S3, and put it into a membership site (ProductDyno). It would not play.
      Then I converted the same clip into h.264, and it played just fine in ProductDyno. Any ideas about that?

      I also used handbrake according to your suggested settings, however handbrake left the first frame black, although the original video does not have a blank first frame. Any idea how to remedy this? This is an issue because the first frame acts as the splash screen.

      • Steven Washer

        I don’t know ProductDyno, but it could be a compatibility problem. As I mentioned in the demo, H.264 is still required for some hardware, and it could also be that your membership site isn’t yet fully compatible. The demo was really about uploading to a video host and letting them do some of the heavy lifting. Does it play if you upload it to YouTube or Vimeo and embed on the site? These days using Amazon S3 is quite limiting, as you do not get the ability to make the videos compatible for mobile devices. As for the 1st frame being blank, you may need to force a frame rate of 25fps or whatever is closest to what you shot it in. I don’t know for sure if that will work. You may have found a bug, but I have not been able to reproduce it yet.

        • Shama

          I have the frame rate set to “same as source”, so that should not be the issue. However I found a way around the blank frame. I set “Range” to “seconds” instead of the default “chapters”, and then I set it to start at 00:02. In this way it skips over the first blank frame. It works, although I am sure that this is not how it is supposed to be.

          I didn’t realize that S3 is not compatible with mobile devices. They do seem to resize okay. However if you recommend Vimeo over S3, I will take a serious look at it. I agree that working with S3 has always been somewhat of a clunky affair. User-friendly is not part of S3’s vocabulary. 🙂

          • Steven Washer

            Great solution! And it’s not that S3 is incompatible. It’s quite compatible. It’s just that you would have to upload so many versions of your video in various sizes as to make the whole situation too unwieldy.

            • Shama

              I get it – so with Vimeo I upload only one big video file, and they automatically come up with different versions of it to display on different devices, correct?

              Should I upload a down-sized version to make the file size as small as possible, or does it work like with youtube where you can upload a huge file, and youtube processes it so that it works well for playback?

            • Steven Washer

              Correct. Vimeo serves up a slimmed down version for mobile devices as needed. And no, you should not give them a smaller version. They won’t know what to do with it. This is what I meant by “let them do the heavy lifting”.

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