Hello All.

I'm using kdenlive to edit drone movies (applying color correction, transitions, etc).
After rendering, the movie on disk looks great (sharp, crispy, vibrant, etc), but when uploading to youtube it looks really bad:
Blurry, a lot of compression artifacts, pixelated, etc.

I've tried forcing VP9 after uploading to youtube (through some editor tricks), it makes things a little better (taking some artifacts out), but not to a noticeable degree, movies still looks awful.

I tried uploading the original footage from the drone (without rendering them) and upload to YouTube: They look great.
I tried uploading my movie without any filters (render through Kdenlive, but no corrections): They look awful.
No matter what codec I use or what parameters I use for the codecs, it still the same.

Any idea what I do wrong?
Attaching picture from youtube (this is AFTER forcing VP9, when it's the original x264 it looks even worse).

Youtube:
https://imgur.com/a/g1203t6

On disk:
https://imgur.com/a/CEpNHkq

Thank you.

difficult to say what youtube is doing. You can try with the render setting: move the quality slider to right and then adjust the video up to 45 down to 15. Maybe it helps.

EDIT: In case of default x264/vpx profiles, video quality corresponds to "crf" encoder parameter, a logarithmic loss quantifier. For better quality you push to the right. crf is almost lossless at 20, okay at 30, poor at 40, but you can choose any intermediate value you want.