Video compression help - for online distribution

[EnQuatre]

I have a 5GB lagarith-encoded lossless avi that looks fantastic--crisp, dark lines, virtually no blocking or color banding... Whenever I try to compress it, however, I end up with some fairly noticeable problems, as well as a general decrease in quality.

This is my video currently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fysBtrW ... azgGSTftaA
I'm not satisfied at all with this level of quality, so I re-exported it, ran it through some filters, and ended up with the abovementioned large .avi which looks great.

Trying the following methods, I get the following results...

Zarx264gui: Compressing with a quantizer set at 16 under recommended settings with deblocking set at both a 1 and a 2, my resulting videos still end up having a lot of blocking and banding

Uploading the entire 5GB .avi directly to Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAVfvsh ... azgGSTftaA (unlisted video)
Youtube compression seems to hurt quality a lot. Despite the fact that I uploaded the full uncompressed file, I still get some blocking and banding, though it's more acceptable. What's unacceptable, however, is the fact that now my lines all look terrible. It feels as though something really got messed up with antialiasing, as formerly smooth lines now look very noticeably jagged.

Compressing with my editing software (Cyberlink Powerdirector 12) and uploading to Youtube:
Compressing the 5GB file using PD12, I end up somewhere in between the two outcomes directly above. I get visual artifacts, but not as bad as when I exported using Zarx264gui, and my lines look somewhat better than they did when uploading uncompressed.

Lastly, the original upload was an MP4 directly exported from the editing software (lazy, I know... regretting it now)
Poorest quality of the lot, but the lines do look smooth.

Color seems to be pretty faithful in all cases, on the bright side.

Any help would be vastly appreciated!!! I feel like I'm missing something simple, and I'd really love to be able to get the full-quality video compressed reasonably well for uploading!

[BasharOfTheAges]

Set QC to 10 and VAQ to 1.0 in ZarxGUI and see how that works for you.

[EnQuatre]

Set QC to 10 and VAQ to 1.0 in ZarxGUI and see how that works for you.

It works pretty well! So it was that simple, huh?

The video/audio guide recommended not to use ZarxGUI below QC = 16, so it hadn't occurred to me that it would have an impact.

Compression is compression, I suppose, so I guess I can't expect to get back exactly what I put in, but it looks pretty good! Most of the visual debris is cleaned up, and line/picture quality is good. Thanks for the reply!

[BasharOfTheAges]

Set QC to 10 and VAQ to 1.0 in ZarxGUI and see how that works for you.

It works pretty well! So it was that simple, huh?

The video/audio guide recommended not to use ZarxGUI below QC = 16, so it hadn't occurred to me that it would have an impact.

That guide is several years old, was written with lower detail, lower resolution source in mind, and was focused on uploading videos to download on this website, not for getting the best results for uploading to a streaming site or encoding for convention submissions.

[EnQuatre]

Hm, is there a more modern guide for tips on dealing with uploading to streaming sites?

My resulting video after following your suggestion looks pretty good on my computer, but once again it seems that after testing it with an upload to Youtube, Youtube would prefer to mess with lines and whatnot again...

It stands to reason that there should be a way to deal with Youtube's processing quirks, given that other people are able to upload with gorgeous results...

[BasharOfTheAges]

Personally, I upload my UTVideo exports to youtube if there's a problem. It takes a while, but haven't had problems with it.

Usually QC10 stuff is all I have to do though.

[DJ_Izumi]

YouTube is -always- going to re-encode your video to make it suit it's bandwidth specs for the different resolutions.

The 5GB AVI was your best bet but there are other options to at least reduce the file you need to update. YouTube uses FFMPEG as it's encoding backend so it supports a stupid range of codecs, this includes h.264's LOSSLESS profile, the color will be crushed to 4:2:0 but otherwise it's lossless, so you'll minimize filesize while not using two lossy encodes to get the final result out of YouTube.