Youtube upload quality, there's something Im not doing right...

For some reason, when I upload to youtube its not as clear as other people. Is there a export setting I should be using in final cut pro that maximizes resolution?

Here's an example of my video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfMXRiS6GRA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IPh0XlzrJk)

Here's someone else's. Much clearer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX3aSeHwf7A

from: http://www.youtube.com/t/help_cat05

What video file formats can I upload?
YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras and camcorders, and cell phones in the .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats.

What's the best format to upload for high quality?
We recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320x240 resolution with MP3 audio, at 30 frames per second. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.



Rich

from: http://www.youtube.com/t/help_cat05

What video file formats can I upload?
YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras and camcorders, and cell phones in the .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats.

What's the best format to upload for high quality?
We recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320x240 resolution with MP3 audio, at 30 frames per second. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.



Rich
Yes, I read that and followed the guidelines. MPEG 4, 30 frames, 320 x 240, h.264. Still no good. Any experts here know how I can make the quality better on youtube?

I don't know what video format you started with but you may have encoded it too many times, you may have tried to make it too small. You have a lot of interlace lines. I do not use Final Cut, H.264 or YouTube so I won't be much help.

Regardless of the format you upload your video in YouTube will convert and recompress your video into a Flash Video file (FLV) so there is going to be some losses. That is a common complaint. They also appear to use a low video bit rate so fast moving objects like you have in your video will get distorted. You also have some segments which appear to be sped up in the driving scene. I don't know if that was intentional or as a result of the encoding process and something being wrong.

So your video is being distorted by the interlace lines which are worse with fast moving scenes, and there is macro blocking due to the low video bit rate.


1. You need to de-interlace your video.

2. You need to increase your video bit rate on the video you send up. I don't know what FCP will call it, it should be one of the quality settings.

3. You need to create a frame size of 320x240 resolution

All of the above should be done at one time. You don't want to be losing quality by re-encoding the file each time.

I don't know if using DivX or Xvid as YouTube reccomends will make a difference. I did a search on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=h.264&search=Search show a lot of videos encoded in h.264, some of them with comments and url's to other sites. You might also search for final cut pro which has some videos.

Sorry I don't have an exact answer for you.



Rich