Solved My 4K video edit looks worse on YouTube than my 1080

Greetings! I've been shooting nature type videos in 1080 30P (mostly) for several years and posting to my YouTube channel. I've been using MS 13 Platinum and haven't had any problems with quality. I just bought a camera that shoots 4K 30P and tested that out for the first time a couple of days ago. I used the same rendering settings I used for the 1080 footage - rendering the 4K to 1080 30P - but the YouTube video is quite a bit more compressed than my previous video. I'm noticing a lot of pixelation in the simple fade transitions between clips. I really don't know a lot about post processing and rendering, so I'm hoping I'm missing something simple in processing the 4K. I tried higher bitrates in the rendering, but the YouTube video looked exactly the same.

I've attached the rendering settings I've been using. My computer is Windows 10, Intel i7-6700 3.4 GHz processor, 16gb RAM, and GeForce GTX 745 card. Any help would be appreciated!

Hi waterfallrich

If you are recording 4K video, why are you not rendering to 4K as well ?

If you upload a 4K video to YouTube, you should see improved video quality on YouTube at 4K and 1080p playback settings.
YouTube compresses the life out of all videos uploaded - there is nothing you can do to control that.
However, uploading the original 4K resolution, normally means better looking video at lower resolutions.

Did you correctly set your Project Properties in Vegas to 3840x2160 resolution ?
This is what your Project Properties should look like.
Make sure to set quality = Best



I would also recommend that you turn OFF resampling.
Right-click all videos on your timeline and go to Switches - set to Disable Resample

In your render settings, make sure Allow source to adjust frame rate = OFF





You may also want to consider upgrading to Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 16.
You can download the free trial and test it out!

Regards
Derek

Thanks for your quick and thorough response Derek! I'm not seeing rendering to 4K in my choices in Movie Studio 13 Platinum. I think I will download the trial version of 16 and give it a try - thanks for that suggestion. I do have the project properties set to 4K, but did not know about turning off resampling on all of the clips. Thanks for that tip also! I'll also uncheck 'Allow source to adjust frame rate' and try another render and upload later. Thanks again!

I'm not seeing rendering to 4K in my choices in Movie Studio 13 Platinum.

You're probably using an old build version of Movie Studio Platinum 13.
Go to this link and enter your v13 serial number and you can get the final build version ever released for v13.
www.magix.com/us/support/my-service-center/product-downloads/

If you do try v16, there are new rendering options now.
Use MAGIX AVC to render your videos - this is the new encoder!