The effect of sharpening on YouTube quality - original version

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France Max Lebled's 2nd channel
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Published on ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuUNfAaARoY


Duration: 1:06
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More explanations below - the findings on bitrate stats can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14QSAEI_C9z3m-eDwuZf2TiAgqYR0wKd5NqD4fmd15J4/edit?usp=sharing

One thing I've noticed over the years is that YouTube's encoders have prioritized anything sharp & bright over anything that is even just a bit blurry and dark. It can sometimes feel like the psychovisual optimizations are a bit simplified, or perhaps they're tuned for high-DPI displays, since the majority of YouTube views now happen on phones?

Anyway, this is partially exacerbated by the pre-processing done to videos, so that "unclean" sources (with lots of noise, weirdly-compressed noise, blockiness, etc.) come out looking better than they did originally, while not eating too much final bitrate. They briefly talk about this here: https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2019/04/launching-youtube-dataset-of-user.html

Now, I feel it should be said that I really can't blame YouTube for this. They have to ingest 500 hours of video per minute, and not all of it is going to be pro-grade quality. They have to make the best compromises they can, and it's kind of nuts to see the level of quality they can achieve, at that scale AND at the relatively-low bitrates they have to stick with.

Much like the overwhelming majority of video services, YouTube hasn't used fixed bitrate allocation in ages, instead opting for a CRF-like metric ("reach this level of perceptual quality"). Throwing a bit of a sharpen filter on any video can dramatically increase the bitrate allocated to a video with most CRF metrics, and so I figured I would try an experiment. This is footage recorded with a GoPro Hero 7 black, at ISO 100 (so there is practically no noise). Sharpening was turned OFF on the camera. I then sharpened it in After Effects myself by 100% This makes the footage look incredibly clean locally.

This is the raw unsharpened footage, straight off the GoPro.

Here's the sharpened one for comparison: https://youtu.be/oAYoFVlQ3_U



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Tags:
youtube vp9
sharpen
unsharp
sharpening
encoding
youtube encoders
youtube encoding
youtube quality
gopro
gopro hero 7
hero 7 black
hero 7