Video Formats For Recording and Editing

Dear assorted Tek Syndicate crew,

I love messing around with video editing, and one of my favorite parts of the process is determining video formats, quality settings, and bit rate for a given project. I was wondering what formats(and settings) you use in both recording video, and for final output for uploads to YouTube. Also, bonus points for your preferred format for long term storage of your original footage/final outputs.

I'm a bit of a quality addict and always use the best quality I can within given constraints. Do you guys often opt for a lower quality encoding to speed up your workflow, or do you always work with the best quality available regardless of the potential slowdown?

Personally I use a mix of raw AVI and H264.

I use raw AVI in 4:4:4 color space at 1080p 24fps for recording and short term storage while editing. I sometimes work with sizes up to 4k when working with time-laps clips shot with my DSLR, and later reduce to 1080p.

I use H264 at varying levels of resolution, frame rate, and bitrate, depending on the project parameters, for storage and upload to YouTube, with the average video being 1920x1080 24fps at 36mb/s using high profile on level 5.1.

If anyone else would like to share I would love to hear from you as well!

 

I shoot with a Panasonic GH2, so until I get an external recorder, I'm stuck with AVCHD 8-bit 4:2:0 files. However, it is hacked (Driftwood's Moon Trial 7), so it's intra-frame (in 24fps, 60fps is GOP 3) and maxes out somewhere around 140Mbps @ 1080p/24fps and 55Mbps @ 720p/60fps. Also, the hack I have is currently shooting actual 24 and 60 fps, not 23.976 or 59.97. Premiere thinks it's ARRI footage for some reason.

I have done some transcoding to DNxHD. Results were pretty meh. It seemed to playback a bit easier on my laptop, but at the cost of huge storage. Since I built a new workstation, I'm going through my old hard drives and only pulling clips that have worthwhile footage on them for archiving. I'm just going to keep them in the native AVCHD format.

As far as exporting, everything pretty much ends up on YouTube and/or Vimeo, so I always go to H.264. Bitrates are 20Mbps for 1080p, 10Mbps for 720p. High profile, Level matches source. Seems to be working fine, but I still can't figure out a good bitrate/setting to keep YouTube and Vimeo's compression stuff from making it look worse than it really is..

That's why I opt for 36mbs for upload. There is apparently a specific format that YouTube formats too when you upload, and apparently if you pre-format to match that, YouTube will leave the 1080p version alone and only encode the lower resolution versions. this apparently is set up so that you can encode it on your own using high quality detail preservation in your preferred video encoder. I do know that some encoders will allow you to specify how much effort is put into detail preservation, but at the expense of longer encode times. try looking up "YouTube preferred upload format" in google, thats how I found out about it last time.

I personally don't bother using their preferred settings, so long as the video I'm uploading has a higher bit rate than what YouTube will convert it too, I don't seem to have any issues with detail loss. If bandwidth isn't an issue, and you don't care to use their preferred format, try using 36mb/s instead, see if that helps any.

Also... I only use true 24fps myself, none of this 23.976 nonsense. Its an archaic standard that should have died out when we stopped using CRT based TVs.