No question - it’s one file, many pictures.
FYI, using ShotCut under Ubuntu Linux, I’ve finally gotten an acceptable video up on YT. Mostly I just picked the YouTube option, bumped quality up to 100% and watched the magic happen. The rendered file looks very good. YT, of course, compressed it to death. >:(
But even that isn’t as bad as earlier tries. For now, I’ll call the fight a draw, and see if I can’t revive some of my earlier videos.
Remember your footage is already a compressed format out of the camera [ooc]. Exporting at 100% won’t improve quality but it will massively increase the file size as the compression ratio will be hugely less than the ooc version. So no visual gain especially as YouTube will re encode and re compress it anyway.
I always export at 60%, VBR and get very good quality.
'Splain me why 60% isn’t, for lack of a better term, worse than 100%.
Overall, what I get from the camera is the baseline. Played back, it has some flaws. NTL it’s the baseline material.
What I want, at the end of editing, is a faithful reproduction of what came into ShotCut. That is, the rendered file, with no transitions or filtering, should look exactly like what came into ShotCut. Since the input file is an MP4 file, and playback of that file (using VLC or another external playback app) is quite acceptable, why shouldn’t ShotCut hand back an MP4 with the same quality? OK, no doubt there will be very minor changes; entropy will not be denied. But the rendered file should be close to indistinguishable from the original input file.
Well I already did.
Out of the camera your footage is already compressed to perhaps 60% (I’d need to know a lot more about your camera and it’s codec compression ratios, but for the sake or the 'splanation it will do)
When you bring it into ShotCut, it is ‘de compressed’ (hence the word codec = COmpress / DECompress).
So, while being viewed and edited, the de compressed footage is much larger in megabytes/gigabytes than it is as a file out of the camera.
When you re ‘encode’ during export at 100%, you will not be compressing the fill as much as the camera did in the first place, resulting in a massively larger file for no quality gain.
No, .MP4 is a lossy format. Every time it’s is re-saved you lose something.
► http://knowledge.timespace.com/index.php/article/what-are-lossless-and-lossy-compression-format
.
There is specialist software which can trim and join your file/s without any re compression - but Shotcut isn’t one of them. I use Video ReMaker for that. But there are others - google can help there.
The camera output is what is. Yes, the camera isn’t being 100% faithful to what the sensor sees. Meh, it is what it is.
Assume output file size doesn’t matter (Terabyte drives are like that). The real challenge is surviving YT’s trashing of the file. Here’s a page listing YT specs. Which of Shotcut’s options is the best fit?
We’re going around in circles because you aren’t appreciating what compression is (it has nothing to do with the sensor).
You are working with inferior highly compressed low quality files in the first place.
There’s nothing you can do about that except perhaps buy a better camera.
The question is linear. The camera is what the camera is. The task is simple, take what I have, do some simple edits, render the results in the most efficient format for YouTube. Sounds straight ahead to me. At the moment, I’m OK with what comes out of ShotCut, but YouTube obviously ruins what I upload, hence the concern about getting the file formed correctly. See this YouTube page for their standards. What ShotCut codec and codec setting is the best match for that spec?
Already answered in post #2
The Youtube preset satisfies Youtube’s critieria.
I’d say less but posting rules prevent it:
out
Libx264