Especially when you’re using Adobe Premiere CS5.
I had an opportunity to utilize skills in video editing—skills that I learned in school as part of my Interactive Media coursework. Unfortunately, these are skills that I haven’t practiced in 10 years or more. In fact, as a web developer (not designer—technically, web developers are software engineers but I digress), there’s not a whole lot of need for video editing skills.
Modern Solutions Using Ancient Software
Anyway, what did I learn about uploading videos from Adobe Premiere CS5 to YouTube? The problem: CS5 is over 10 years old, so there may be some limitations in what it’ll support on export. For instance, since my videos are coming from my phone, they’re pretty big frame-wise because of the high-def format (2220×1080 59.97 fps). Apparently, there’s some video tutorials on how to export 4K from CS5 and CS6—of course, I didn’t find those until after I’d settled on my own solution.
Also, another problem I ran into is the MP4 format. MP4 is currently YouTube’s standard for uploading. Unfortunately, all the presets in Premiere CS5 for MP4 are geared towards teensy-weensy videos, like the ones that could be found on iPods and iPhones back in 2010. High Def was just barely a thing then. I don’t think the format actually took off until later that year.
What I’ve Learned So Far
- Don’t use MPEG2 format. YouTube will compress the shit out of your video until it’s unrecognizable. It might look fine once it comes out of Premiere, but it will look like flaming hot dog-shit once it’s been processed by YouTube.
- Use Uncompressed Microsoft AVI format, and make sure you select UVYV as the codec because if you’re on Windows 10, the default media player (it’s horseshit and nothing compared to the Media Player of days past) won’t recognize the YUV codec, unless maybe you view it in VLC?
- Optionally, run that uncompressed AVI through a transcoder like Adobe Encoder or Handbrake. If you have Premiere, you’re probably going to have Encoder as well, but if you don’t, Handbrake is free and is more modern than Encoder CS5.
Uncompressed AVIs Are Still King but Not Without Caveats
The reason I said that encoding the uncompressed AVI was optional is that YouTube will convert the video to mp4 with very minimal compression. However, caveat: uncompressed AVIs are notoriously huge depending on the frame format and length of the video, so you’re looking at increased upload times. Hence, the need for doing your encoding before upload.
Of course, dumbass me didn’t think to look at the H.264 preset drop-down because guess what? YouTube HD Widescreen was right fucking there the whole damned time. However, that doesn’t completely invalidate Option 3. You may still want to go the uncompressed AVI route, and use Handbrake instead for the aforementioned reason of it being more modern, and AVI has practically been around forever so it’s nearly everything supports it.
As for that, I’m going to check out those tutorials on working with 2 & 4K formats in Premiere CS5 when I’m not grinding my way through Summer 2020.
Hope you enjoyed this crash-course on modern video editing using older software, and now back to grinding through the Summer 2020 event!