Upload edited video to YouTube

Question

Please help. I am sure I am not the only neophyte who has run into this. I hope someone can.

I want to:

1. Download the video recording of a Facebook livestream.
2. Make minor edits in Adobe Premiere Pro (cut footage, add slides and/or music, and transitions)
3. Upload the final product to YouTube.

I need to do this twice a day, with a 30-minute livestream session each time.

The MP4 that I download from Facebook is small (around 70 MB) and has these properties:

Type: MPEG Movie File Size: 69.92 MB 
Image Size: 640 x 360 
Frame Rate: 30.00 
Source Audio Format: 
48000 Hz - 
Compressed - 
Stereo Project Audio Format: 48000 Hz - 
32 bit floating point - 
Stereo Total 
Duration: 00;29;31;19 
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0 
Alpha: None 
Video Codec Type: MP4/MOV H.264 4:2:0 
Variable Frame Rate Detected –

If I just turn around and upload this file to YouTube unchanged, it uploads and processes straightforwardly and quickly. (My upload speed is 11-12 Mbps)

If I make any edits, though (today I took out 13 seconds of coughing from the middle):

1. The output file size balloons (to almost 1.88 MB) using the YouTube SD Pre-set.
2. I can reduced the file size to 342 MB by running it through VLC Convert/Save, using the VLC YouTube SD preset.

It has now been 6 hours, and YouTube is showing the file only 26% uploaded (though the progress bar surged to 72% at one point). Not even at the point of "processing" yet.

This happens every time I edit.

I am a total newbie and don't have the luxury to spend time experimenting with settings, most of which I don't understand. Based on what I gleaned from some How-To videos, I did play with various screen sizes (down to 640x360) and bit rates. I have also tried different YouTube and Facebook Presets.

Can someone please help? I want to reach the people in my congregation who use Facebook and those who will only watch YouTube.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with facebook video, and maybe someone else can help with that. 70MB is insanely small for 30 mins of video. What are the properties of the source video (in Premiere, right click the source video, select Properties). Copy/Paste that info, and add it to your question if you can.

Leave the frame size / frame rate the same as the original - Premiere has a "Match Source" button in the output settings, just ensure it is ticked. Often scaling down the resolution lowers the quality too much, and I find you usually get a better trade off keeping the resolution and lowering the bit rate instead. What is the bitrate in the preset? For video files that need to be transferred, I usually output using H.264 codec, at 6Mbps target rate. That still gives me almost 50MB/minute (with audio), but retains the quality level where I need it. You could likely push that bitrate lower - try lower bitrates, see what your video looks like (if this is a fixed camera / fix background video, likely you can push the bitrate pretty hard without much impact to quality). But you won't get the FB file size with that codec, so that extra info would be handy.

For uploading, do you have Google Drive? You could sign up a free account there, and sync the files, which might make putting the video to YouTube easier than uploading direct: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/5937118?hl=en