Hi all,
I just started using Kdenlive. I am a student in an online classical guitar course and I post a video of my lesson on youtube with a link posted on the lesson forum.

I can do the basic editing but I have no clue about the render outputs and what the differences are.

I am recording my lessons on a 'Flip Video' digital recorder and using Kdenlive to cut out all the boo-boo, scratching, and sneezing parts. I have been using the MP4, 800k, 2pass option for rendering but I have no idea if that is good, bad, or indifferent.

Hopefully someone can direct me to further reading about all these formats or at least suggest a good setting for rendering a Flip-Video file to a youtube friendly file.

Thanks for looking.

There is some advice in the help pages at youtube.com. Basically they support a variety of formats and say to upload the highest quality video you can.

Generally speaking the higher the bit rate you use during rendering the higher the quality of the video. However I can't see a good reason for rendering to a higher bitrate than what your camera records to. So it's a good idea to find out what bitrate your camera uses. Of course, the higher the bitrate used for rendering the larger the video file and the longer it takes to upload. If your internet connection isn't all that fast you might want to use a lower bitrate just to make the upload time bearable.

The H.264 codec is said to give better quality than the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ones for a given bit rate. So H.264 is what I normally use for rendering.

Hope that helps. The bottom line is that if you like the way the video looks and sounds after you upload it, then you are doing the right thing.

tidris769 wrote:

"The H.264 codec is said to give better quality than the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ones for a given bit rate. So H.264 is what I normally use for rendering."

Amen to that. I'd like to delete a number of my earlier YouTube videos and reload them in H.264.

Best,

dp

Interesting, been using MPEG4 for ages, out of habit I guess, will be sure to give H.264 a shot next time around, thanks for the tip

Most grateful to everyone for your info. I will try H.264. Can anyone tell me what the difference is between single pass and 2 pass rendering?

In my limited knowledge, the 1st pass looks at the video file and then varies the encoding/bitrate on the second pass, depending on what the first pass sees in the video file, so can be of higher quality at lower bitrates and also give smaller file sizes due to the first pass. 1 pass encoding gives a constant bitrate and larger file sizes.

In my experience and for what I do,, it doesn't make a big enough difference to be worth the extra encoding time

For what it's worth, I tried h.264 and the rendered sound was choppy and sounded awful on my playback. There's always a possibility that it was something in playback on my system and would have been ok if uploaded to youtube but since I know MP4 works fine I just switched back to that.

H.264 is a more sophisticated codec and therefore it needs more computer horsepower to run smoothly. So yeah, if your computer isn't all that fast then maybe H.264 isn't the best choice for videos you intend to play directly from your computer.

However you need to keep in mind that when you upload a video to youtube they don't just distribute it to the whole world exactly as you uploaded it. Instead they will transcode it to the formats and bitrates they deem appropriate for a good viewing experience by the majority of youtube users. That transcoding they do will degrade your video to some extent, and that's why it's a good idea to upload the best quality video you can.

Personally I find that WebM works better than H.264 as of late. For some reason YouTube tends to attempt a reencode of H.264 videos, and that makes the quality horrible. It doesn't reencode WebM or MPEG-4 content, though. And WebM gives a lot better size/quality ratio than MPEG-4.

When rendering under "destination" there is an entry called "Web sites" where one can select YouTube with two different sizes (640x480 and 1280x720) both 1 an 2 pass.

It generates an .mp4 file.

I wonder what is the difference between these and the "MP4" renderings and what is the relationship between these two and the various 1000k, 2000k values in the "File rendering" section.

@bobg

I have found Mark Pilgrim's discussion of video formats and codecs quite enlightening. It is located here:
http://www.diveintohtml5.com/video.html
Though he writes for a web-developer audience, I think he clearly describes how the various MP4, H264, etc codecs and formats work, especially as it relates to presenting video online.

Scanning this section may give you some extra tips about a 'best' format.