If you want to learn the best high quality export and render settings for your YouTube
videos, then you've come to the right place.
I'm Pete from the Gaming Careers YouTube channel where we have videos explaining everything
you need to do to grow your gaming passion into your profession and today I will be talking
you through the best render and export settings in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
Before we get started, I just wanted to mention I will be using Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017
in this tutorial.
It doesn't actually matter which version of Premiere Pro you have, the render settings
are pretty much the same throughout all of them.
If however you are using Sony Vegas, I have another video up here, I'll link it in the
card above, so click that if you need render settings for Sony Vegas instead.
With that said, let's get on with the video.
OK, as you can see we are in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017 here and I've got some test footage
down here, just an Overwatch clip with an intro/outro and a voice over just to simulate
the kind of thing that I imagine you guys are going to be rendering out for your YouTube
channels.
So, in the timeline you can see I've got the whole clip selected and this is everything
that I want to render out.
If you're in the position where you just want to render out small sections of your timeline,
you need to use in and out points which you can use the keyboard, I and O keys to set
your in and out points as to where you want to render.
For the majority of you, I imagine you're going to be wanting to render out the whole
of your timeline which is what you've edited together.
So, what we do is we go up to File, down to Export and across to Media which will bring
up a new window with all your export settings.
So if you wanted to do the sequence in and out points here, you can see this is what
you want to have selected and it should show across this bar exactly what you're going
to be rendering.
I'm going to do the entire sequence which is also the same as the in and out points
for me and as you can see if I scroll through I'm getting a live picture of what I am going
to be rendering.
So you want to make sure that you have "Match Sequence Settings" unchecked and for format
there's a lot of different options but you want to be choosing "H.264", I'm not really
going to be going into a lot of detail as to why H.264 is the best you're just going
to have to trust me on that one, but I will find a video and link it in the description
which goes into more detail as to why H.264 is what you want to be choosing for your YouTube
videos.
Now under preset there's going to be a lot of different options, again this can be quite
confusing.
It doesn't really matter what you select at this stage because we are going to be editing
all the settings anyway, but we might as well choose something that's going to give us some
of the right settings so we are not fiddling around too much.
For the sake of this video, let's just choose "Match Source: High Bitrate".
Like I said, we are going to be editing all the settings anyway so it doesn't really matter
what you select.
Next go to output name, this is just what you are going to be calling your file and
where you are going to be saving it.
So for me, this folder looks good and I'm going to call it "Test Sequence" and clicking
save.
Make sure you have export video and export audio checked and then we can come down into
the tab interface here.
Now as you can see we have 6 different tabs across the top, we actually only really care
about the video and audio tabs.
The other tabs do have their uses but for 99% of people you're not going to be using
any of these at this stage, especially for gaming footage.
So I'm just going to be covering the video and audio tabs which is what you're going
to be using the majority of the time.
So on the video tab, let's make sure that we unchecked all these settings down the right
here so that we can edit them.
We are going to start with the resolution.
Really nowadays 1080p or 1920x1080 is the standard, FullHD.
You can get away with lower resolutions but if you're wanting to really push your content
on your gaming channel I recommend that 1080p is what you want to use so you enter here
1920x1080.
This should also match the source footage that you used, so if you used some game capture
service either through a capturing device from your Xbox or Playstation or if you're
just screen recording on OBS or some similar software, you want to make sure this is matching
up with your source footage, so you are recording your game in 1080p and then you're also finishing
your video in 1080p.
So here we have 1920x1080, if your footage is 1280x720 you can change it here but as
I said, really nowadays the standard is 1920x1080p.
Frame-rate is kind of a similar thing, you want to make sure it matches your source video.
For gaming videos I really do recommend now that you record your footage at 60fps, it
will look so much smoother for your audience and YouTube now supports 60fps and gives you
a slightly higher bitrate.
So if you have the hardware to record at 60fps I really do recommend it.
Again, if your source footage is 30fps change it here to 30, mine's 60 so I'm going to leave
it at 60.
Now sometimes you may get an error message when you select 60fps here saying something
about invalid frame size or frame rate for this level.
That's OK, you can just come down to Profile: Main and make sure that you change Profile
to High and Level to 5.1.
That should then allow you to change your framerate back to 60 without any issues.
Aspect ratio should be left at 1 otherwise your video is going to look absolutely horrible
and TV standard really doesn't matter because we aren't rendering for TV we are rendering
for YouTube.
Render at maximum depth, now if any of your footage was recorded with like a really really
good camera, and by that I mean a very expensive DSLR or something like a RED-epic then you
do want to render at maximum depth because it will be shot at 10-bit or higher but for
99% of people, people recording with camcorders, webcams, game footage that kind of thing none
of your footage is going to be recorded at 10-bit or higher so you can leave this unchecked
and it will save you some time in rendering.
For this video, none of mine is over 10-bit so I can leave it unchecked.
Now bitrate settings, you want to start with the bitrate encoding going to 2-pass, I'm
just going to do a quick explanation as to what that means.
VBR means variable bitrate and the difference between 1 and 2-pass is that in 2-pass the
first of the 2 passes actually analyses the project and then the second pass executes
the compression.
So 2 pass does yield a better result especially for gaming videos when there's a lot of high
motion, it will definitely benefit from a second pass but do note that it does take
significantly longer than a 1-pass so if you're constricted for time you may want to select
1-pass here.
If you have time and want the best quality, select 2-pass.
Now for target and maximum bitrate this is actually going to be the quality of your video.
I've seen some tutorials on YouTube where people recommend going up to insane numbers
like 50 for your target bitrate and it just amazes me that people follow these instructions
blindly.
YouTube compresses the absolute sh*t out of any video you upload so once you go past a
certain amount the difference in quality that you will see will be so negligible since YouTube
compresses it anyway.
So trust me here, I've tested it, save some time and set your Target bitrate to 14 and
your Maximum bitrate to 16.
Anything above that, you're honestly not going to be able to notice any difference and it's
going to take much longer to render.
This actually already is overkill, it's more likely to be 10 and 12 for decent results
but this is what I would consider perfect.
Now if you go down to advanced settings, you can leave your keyframe distance at it's default
and VR video, if you're doing something with VR you're probably not going to be watching
this tutorial so you can leave that unchecked as well.
Let's go onto the audio tab before we do any of these.
So on the audio tab you want to make sure your audio format is set at AAC, your sample
rate is at 48000Hz, stereo channels obviously, audio quality at high and bitrate you can
just select anything really above 192 here, I wouldn't go any lower than 192 as it will
start to sound a bit sh*t, I leave it at 320 but that's probably a little bit overkill.
So, down at the bottom we've got a few more options.
Use maximum render quality, you can check this if you have a super fast processor and
you're really looking to squeeze every bit of quality you can out of the video renderer
but it only really helps if you're doing some sort of scaling like recording at 4K and then
scaling down to 1080p.
It doesn't really make much difference outside of that and it does add a lot of time to your
render time so I recommend leaving it unchecked.
Use previews, this is a really useful option but it's kind of just down to personal preference.
I don't personally check this but if you do have a slower computer and you want to render
by using the previews that it's already made when you were editing then you absolutely
can feel free to.
Now, the rest of the options can be left completely as they are.
You've got these 2 options, queue and export.
Export will just start the render straight away in Adobe Premiere Pro, it's not as flexible
as queuing so that's why I really recommend using the Queue function and that's what I'm
going to be showing you in this video but if you just want to start exporting straight
away, this will take these settings and export.
I'm going to queue though.
So once you've pressed queue, it opens up a program called Adobe Media Encoder CC and
this is completely separate actually to Premiere Pro so you could close down Premiere Pro now
as it has all the render settings that you just set.
The reason that I recommend this over straight out encoding in Premiere Pro is this allows
you to do a few things, it allows you to queue many renders of the same video or multiple
different videos, for example if you've created lots of different videos in 1 day and you
want to render them over night.
It also allows you to pause and resume renders if you need to use the processor for something
else, although I don't really recommend this as I guess it could interfere with the video
render although it shouldn't I've just never used it myself.
So once you're in here, make sure you've got the settings right which have come from the
export window in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Also this is the output location it will have taken, so once you're all good you can go
ahead and click the start queue button and it will make it's way through the queue starting
with this first render.
One thing I forgot to mention just before I started the render there is that you can
actually choose to use your graphics card if it's an NVIDIA graphics card you can use
some technology called CUDA to accelerate the render process.
Software only will just use the CPU.
This is really reliable I've found in Premiere Pro so I always use the acceleration for the
graphics card aswell but if you do run into problems, this might be an option that you
need to change back to using the CPU only.
And that is it!
Once your render has finished, upload it to YouTube, enter in your description, your titles,
your tags, all that good stuff, upload your custom thumbnail and then prepare for the
sudden influx of comments from people telling you how great your new video looks.
Thank you so much for watching and I hope you found the video helpful, if you did be
sure to give it a thumbs up because that really helps us get to know which kind of content
you guys enjoy and we can make more of it in the future.
Also, if you're new here at the Gaming Careers YouTube channel be sure to have a look around,
we've got loads of tutorials helping you grow your passion into your profession, really
up your numbers on YouTube and on Twitch so if that's something that interests you be
sure to click subscribe and see you in the next video, Peace!