Did YouTube do away with 4K?

Searching for 4k (4096 horizontally by 2306 or some other number vertically) videos on Youtube today, I realized there aren't any. Including those that certainly were 4K last time I watched them - probably 6 months to a year ago.

If you are interested in videos with resolutions higher than 1080p, you may remember that YouTube announced support for full 4K resolutions in their official blog post of July 2010, "What's bigger than 1080p? 4K video comes to YouTube". No subsequent blog posts seem to announce any changes to supported resolutions. In my blog post shortly after YouTube's announcement of 4K support, I pondered about the reasons YouTube decided to support 4K given the extreme rarity of computer systems and devices that were capable of displaying it. My guess was YouTube was future-proofing itself and playing with possibilities.

Here is the playlist I assembled of 4K 2K clips. In quite a few of them, you see the posted resolution of 4096xN where "N" is the vertical resolution number usually between 2160 and 3072. All of these videos now only play at 2048x1536. You can verify that by right-clicking on the video and selecting "Show video info".

Do you know why and when YouTube decided to stop supporting full 4K videos?

(A 2K video sample. To watch it in full 2K glory, click "Play" first; then select "original" in video settings - the wrench symbol in the bottom right of the player box. Make it full screen. Pause and wait till it buffers if you don't have a particularly fast Internet connection. It helps if your monitor is large with a native resolution higher than 1080p.  How's the viewing experience?)

P.S. 4K is not the same as 4096P, and 2K - is not 2048p.  In "4K", "2K" and similar designations, the number such as 4096 stands for horizontal resolution, i.e. 4096 pixels horizontally by 1536 vertically.  Designations such as 1080p (along with 720p, 480p, 1080i, etc.) refer to vertical resolutions (e.g. 1920 horizontally by 1080 vertically).  In the old analog TV days, signal resolution was also measured horizontally, i.e. in the number of vertical lines, like today's 4K.

Optimizing HD uploads for YouTube

YouTube has become a very popular video sharing site, and recently, it started to let users upload HD videos. While these HD videos won't match Blu-ray or Dish HD quality, they still look fantastic compared to standard YouTube videos, which, to be honest, look crappy at best.

The questions often comes up, how to best save an HD video, to upload it to YouTube?

While YouTube's "Optimizing your video uploads" help article does recommend a resolution of 1280x720 for 16x9 HD videos, and lists recommended codecs (H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 preferred), it does not recommend a specific bitrate. What's a man to do, when a 5-minute video can be as big as 700MB in HDV format, and take many hours to upload?

Experimenting with various bitrates and types of encoding helped me narrow down the optimum settings for YouTube's HD videos.

YouTube re-compresses the videos anyway, so bigger files will not always produce better quality. I.e. uploading raw HDV videos (at 19-25Mbs) will be horrendously slow over a standard DSL connection, and the quality will not be visibly higher vs. videos encoded at 3Mbs H.264.

Certainly, a 25Mbs video will look better than a 3Mbs one, before it's uploaded to YouTube. Once it's uploaded, however, YouTube will "process" it, making it as small as possible while trying to maintain its quality, and once processed, a 25Mbs video is unlikely to look any better than a 3Mbs one.

I did a number of test encodes and uploads, starting at 500Kbs and ending at 7Mbs. After a 3Mbs "sweet spot", all tests looked very similar on YourTube, in HD mode. There were still barely noticeable differences between a 3Mbs and a 4Mbs test videos, but they were insignificant to my eye, and I did look really hard in full screen mode, on a 30" professional LCD monitor. After 4Mbs, these differences disappeared altogether. In other words, a 7Mbs video looked exactly the same as a 4Mbs one.

The encoding was done with a Adobe Media Encoder (part of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3), using Mpeg4 H.264 codec, single pass VBR (Variable Bit Recording).

To summarize, 3Mbs Mpeg4 (H.264) VBR (Variable Bit Recording) seems to be the optimum setting for most videos, to encode for YouTube HD. Any higher, and it's unlikely that YouTube HD viewers will feel it. At 2Mbs, it's not bad but you will see more compression artifacts than at 3Mbs, and 1.5Mbs will make YouTube think it's HD, but the quality will not be that great.

The resultant files are not exactly small, about 22MB per minute of video, but still far smaller than raw HDV, which is 142 to 187MB per minute. At 3Mbs, a 5-minute video will be about 110MB in size, and take about 25 minutes to upload over a 3Mb/768Kb DSL connection. A similar HDV video will take close to 3 hours to upload.

Vista 64 Upgrade Tips for Video Editing Systems

So it's getting to be that time for Windows OS 64 bit upgrades. God I remember (though I'd prefer not to), months of utter frustration for me and my clients, upgrading Windows 2K to XP Pro. So I figure I'd share a few hints to make everything go a little bit smoother.

First off let me say that these tips are specifically for DV411 systems and the like: editing, special effects, color correction and other task oriented systems. For general computing you'll probably not want to do any of these.

Preparation

Update your system BIOS, preferably before you even put in the upgrade CD or DVD. For the majority of our systems this should be relatively painless, most you can do from XP using a utility provided by the OEM or motherboard manufacturer. Disable any devices in the BIOS that you are not using (e.g. SAS controllers, parallel ports etc.).

Now take a look at your device manager, make a note of all the devices in your system and make sure there are 64-bit drivers and if so download the to a flash drive or burn them to a CD. The easiest to forget are the chipset and drivers. If you have any question about which ones you need, check your '_archive' folder (that we install on our systems) and you'll find the 32 bit drivers in there. Also be sure to get the HDD controller driver, you may need this to even install the new OS.

Now I am going to recommend everyone start with a new system drive, keep your XP drive with all your software just in case some catastrophe happens and nothing works. At least you don't have to worry about being down for any length of time. I will add as far as drives go the faster the better as always.

Some recommendations

• New solid state drives are writing 80 to 100 MB/s and reading over 150 MB/s with capacities up to 250GB. I'm not quite ready to say grab one right away, but if your in the mood to experiment, well why not.
• WD raptor 10K SATA drives are around 50 to 70 read/write
• Any 7200 RPM 32MB cache drive (most of you will use this) is around 30 to 40 MB/s read/write

As always I recommend getting the smallest (in GB's not form factor) that you can get away with. The bigger the drive the more likely you are going to be lax on system maintenance and the more likely you are going to save stuff you shouldn't, to the system drive. Bear in mind your system drive is the hardest working drive and the most likely to fail. So plan on keeping it to software only if possible.

Right, so I guess we're ready to begin.

Upgrade

Remove unnecessary devices:

• First, disconnect any peripherals, printers, HDD arrays and the like.
• Next lets unplug any internal hard drives, including the current system drive, however if possible, leave it in there. No need to spend time un-mounting the old system drive if for whatever reason we have to use it.
• Secondly and only if you are comfortable doing this lets remove every card in the system save the graphics card. Pay special attention to the second PCIe 16x slot, sometimes the retention lever is hidden by the card. Do not apply excessive force to remove or adjust anything.
• Ok, let's just pull the power and sata/pata connection from your current system drive and put it on the new one.

Now lets take a step back and check out what we have. You should have only the system drive, DVD-ROM or other optical drive, and the graphics card connected to power. If so, we are ready to go.

So I am just going to assume the initial installation, until you need to install drivers, went smoothly and you have that annoying Vista screen in front of you. Let's plug in that flash drive
or CD and get your graphic card drivers in there first. After you reboot, lets get to a working resolution (display setting are accessed the same way as XP).

Let's bring up the device manager (Control Panel | System and Maintenance | System | Device Manager); hopefully the list of yellow is not too bad. You should have everything on your flash drive. I would start with the motherboard and onboard device drivers first e.g. Ethernet, audio, etc. You can go ahead and install any cards besides your I/O such as Fiber cards, eSATA and the like. And repeat the driver installs until you run out of yellow warnings.

The Tweaks

Now, I have a few tweaks for you before you start installing software:

1. Disable Windows indexing - another one of those unneeded resource cloggers. If your system is incredibly fast you can keep it on. Essentially it caches files so you can search them faster, this feature will kill older systems. Go to the properties of the C: drive and uncheck “index drive for faster searching” and the check “include subfolders and files”.
2. Turn of window search. Open a shell (start menu/run) and type Msconfig. In the services tab you'll see windows search. Uncheck it and hit OK.
3. Turn off UAC (this feature made me want to kill people).
   This is the function that makes you confirm every bloody keystroke in the belief that it will magically prevent viruses. Click on Start and then click on your username picture top right of the start menu, then click on 'Turn User Account Control on or off',
   uncheck (or check) User Account Control, select ok and restart.
4. Next let's get rid of a few things you'll never use. Press Start/Control Panel/Classic View and select Programs and Features, Choose 'Turn Windows Features On and Off. You can safely unselect 'Indexing Service', 'Windows DFS Replication Service', 'Windows Fax & Scan' (unless you use Fax through a modem), Windows Meeting Space, Games, 'Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications'.

There are a bunch of other things you can do to remove process bloat, but I think this much will get us started. As well there are things like disabling autoplay and going to a more classic GUI scheme, but those don't matter much with the powerful graphics cards these days. Anyway it's all matter of your comfort level with the interface.

At this point we should power down and reconnect any internal drives and mount the new system drive in the place of the old one. Just pop the old drive into a static bag and find a nice shelf for the old guy. Lets reconnect any fiber or SCSI arrays at this time. If you have large arrays we will want to plan on reformatting them, but let's not get into that now.

Lets go back to the device manager and make sure everything you just connected shows up and has drivers. Also check if any drives need to be reactivated or imported.

Software Installation

Now the fun part - installing your software. Just get it all in there, I usually do the Adobe suites first. And don't forget to run any updates that are available. Also make sure any plugin's you have are 64 bit compatible. I have a feeling this is going to be our biggest problem. But I am going to assume it went fine. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Right, let's shut down and install your I/O card (AJA, BMD, Matrox, etc.). You might want to send me an e-mail, I sure there will be some card specific tweaks for each manufacturer that we'll have to deal with. I can't write about them yet mostly, because no one is giving me any yet :).

Last but not least, lets install these new fangled I/O card drivers! I'm hoping they're painless and easy (again at the time of this writing, I ain't got ‘em). Testing protocols will be different for each type of card (and each client). The first thing to check is your output plugins. The easiest is to load up After Effects, set the preview settings to the card and make sure you are getting some output. I recommend a standard test pattern. Don't forget to test both digital and analog. Next test capture, this is going to vary depending on what camera/deck you have. As well, try importing footage captured from your previous version. Now lets import a couple of your CS3 projects/comps.

So that's basically it. This little article Is not complete at all mind you, I just wanted to give you all a heads up with what you're in for. As time passes I will have a much better idea of what specific hardware/software configurations work best. Stay tuned! Get it, like tune up…You know puns used to be the highest form of comedy *sigh*.