I've been making videos for Disk media before DVD's came out. Never was really happy with the quality until they let me use the mp4 format with my Blu~Rays. That mp2 format for Blu~Rays, was terrible and looked nothing like my camcorder HD video. Today I'm still waiting for them to let us author affordable compatible UHD Blu~ray videos, with menus, with full 4K resolution. I see a H.265 Panasonic Camcorder I want. Anyway, when I started using iClone 3 in 1999, they had a great mp4 encoder and it just disappeared with a B.S. story that it never changed. Please, I been working on electronic stuff since 1958. I was helped out by the users on here to use sequential files, and that worked, until I went back to mp4 after I learned how to tweak the encoder. A few months ago, a guy was making beautiful videos on YouTube and everyone was amazed. Last week I was messing around with old videos I was going to publish on You Tube, and I did not like the way they looked. 720 X 480 @ 8 Kbps, mp4. Here this guy video is 1280 x ??? @1 Kbps mp4, and his stuff looks incredible. My file is 14 minuets is 800 MB looks crappy, and his is only 100 MB and looks good. So what I did next was, I took my video editor and changed the setting so the 720 X 480 video to become 1280 X whatever? Then instead of outputting it to mp4, I used the HEVD (.265) output which comes with my Magix editor, that I had no use for it, since I can't make UHD Blu~Rays, and from experimenting before I saw no difference at higher bitrates than my mp4 videos. I was on this slow AMD 8150 computer instead of my i7-6800 computer. The time to render took over 5 hours for this 16 minute video. When I woke up I couldn't believe how good this video looked, at a little more than a 1.2 Kbps video rate. I took the same video and rendered it at 1280, and 8 Kbps using mp4 encoding, 8 kbps, and it looked like crap, squares, blotches, artifacts all over the place. I then decided to use the first minute of my iClone Favela Azul, with the HEVC encoding output at a average around 1.3 Kbps, on my fast computer, once with software encoding and once with hardware (290X) encoding, the hardware encoding was faster and was 10,803 in size, compared to software encoding, 11,839. As I read last week, some one said software encoding looks better than hardware, and when I compared to two, I visibly saw much more artifacts with the hardware encoding. So I uploaded software encoded short 1 minute version of Favela Azul HEVC encoded version, and compared to the old one at full screen, which file size is about 8 times a bigger. The HEVC (.265H), looks way better, you can see the writing on the caps etc.  Sometimes with You Tube and others, they seem to lose their sharpness while playing at times. For those who have Magix, or other video editors with the H. 265 encoder, in the video options output, I set the Avg bit to:1300, Max bit to 1500. Code quality to: Best, and left the Hardware encoding box unchecked. Try two one minute clips of the same video with mp4 at 8 Kbps, and then with HEVC encoding at 1 Kbps. With You Tube you will get reduced rates of playback if watching a stream at different times, so it may not be a fair comparison. But you can check the 1 minute HEVC version, and compare to the original mp4 compressed 8 minute version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4yvXsvhhwM  

Home built; ASRock X570 Pro 4, AMD Ryzen 9-5950X CPU, AMD RADEON RX6900XT, 16GB video card, 131GB of RAM.

This post helped me realized that HARDWARE ENCODING must be TURNED OFF for AMD video cards.  It causes the bitrate to drop to very low levels.

I tested a 12 second, 4K render with SS turned on. 
With hardware encoding on, the file looks a little soft and is only 15 megabytes.  With hardware encoding off, the file looks sharp and is 147 megabytes-- almost ten times larger.

high quality videos on youtube ...

rule number one, always render frames on iclone never videos. 
rule numer two , alwyas render in 4k. this is your way to avoid the high compression on youtube. 
rule nmber tre. use h264 codec at 30 megs per sec. youtube work at 15 mega per sec. so put 2x.
rule number four, dont use youtube : ) for high quality jobs use vimeo :) 
 

Hello,
i have the same Problem with the bad Quality in YouTube.
My Video is a 4k YouTube Video. At the beginning the Quality of the still Picture is very good.
But the Video have a very bad Quality, with big Pixels. I checked a lot of different Video Formats
and Quality but no good Result in the YouTube Video. But when i look the Video on a 4k TV the YouTube quality
is perfect. Only on my PC with Standard HD Resolution i have a bad Qualität.
What can i do for a better Quality in YouTube
Thanks al lot for Information 

Greetings GHarry