Best 8K Video Export Settings for YouTube

8K is becoming more and more of a reality. You can buy a (relatively) affordable camera, shoot and edit some 8K, and export it on a decent machine without too much thought.

If you are looking at getting one of those fancy new setups and are going to start exporting 8K content to share on YouTube, you’ll likely want to find a good starting place to make sure it looks as good and sharp as you can get it.

For most editors working in Premiere Pro CC and sending to YouTube, filmmaker Chung Dha did a lot of the legwork already going through different bitrates for quality as well as processes so you don’t have to leave your computer to render all weekend.

Should you even start shooting and delivering 8K? Well… I’m not too sure about 8K delivery, but 8K capture has some objectively good benefits, such as cropping or simply downsampling for better 4K. This discussion could probably go on for a whole day, but for those who are ready you should keep on reading.

Working with an 8K sequence in Premiere Pro, Chung jumps into the settings. He points out you’ll need to be working on 8K in an 8K sequence as it won’t properly scale during the export if you are trying to go to 8K from a 4K sequence.

When you have your sequence ready to go you’ll want to head over to your Export > Media as usual. In this test I want to note that Chung is working with an upscaled 4K clip to 8K, but this should have no impact on the actual render settings.

Image Credit: Adobe

Here are the recommended settings:

  • Format: H.264
  • Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 pass
  • Target Bitrate: 120 Mb/s
  • Maximum Bitrate: 120 Mb/s
  • Audio Format: AAC
  • Sample Rate: 48000 Hz
  • Audio Quality: High
  • Audio Bitrate: 512 kb/s

That’s it! Recommend you make a preset if this is going to be a commonly used setting for you.

Do you have any of your own recommendations on best settings for 8K export in your NLE of choice?

[source: chungdha]

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