Hi!
I know that YouTube will require you to take down publicly posted videos with copyrighted material, or will sometimes kill off the sound. What about private videos?
For example, if I posted a video of my kids with a popular song as the soundtrack, or a video of me playing a video game with a copyrighted song playing, would that be taken down or otherwise modified?
I know I could just try it, but I don’t really want to pick up any warnings on my YouTube channel.
I don’t think they would, but that’s on the possible misunderstanding that youtube itself doesn’t look for the songs, it’s the copyright holders that flag the videos.
In that case, if they can’t find the song, they won’t be able to do anything about it.
You could find out pretty easily though, upload a video with a Beatles song and make it private. I believe Beatles songs get pulled pretty quickly. And, I assume, Prince’s estate is likely flagging videos just as quickly know as he was before.
I thought YouTube automatically scanned uploaded videos for material. OK, I guess I can give it a try – I doubt my channel will be taken down for a first offense. I’ll report back if anything happens.
I have an unlisted (but not private) video that uses the classic theme from Godzilla (posted here in this thread.) yesterday I went to change it from unlisted to public and discovered that it has been blocked worldwide for copyright reasons. (The video has a total of 107 views.)
All they generally do is require you to take the video down, mute the audio or runs ads on your video. It’s typically at the discretion of the copyright holder.
Bigger youtubers get his with that kind of thing all the time and they’re still producing plenty of videos. You’re not going to get kicked off youtube for a one time thing.
I posted a video of a newlywed couple’s first dance and got flagged for the song in the background. IIRC, I changed the video to unlisted and it was fine.
Well, I uploaded the video and made it private. Minutes later, I got this e-mail:
Looks like I’m out of luck. Thanks, anyway!!
You’ve already figured it out, but I’ll share this anyway:
I work at a high school. We had a student being treated for cancer 3-4 years ago. They
recorded the student’s classes on video and put them on a private YouTube channel. They had to ask the teachers not to play music when the students were working on projects in a class being recorded because YouTube would mute the audio, making the video useless for the student.
I put up a video of a parody song (I wrote the parody lyrics and performed the song). When I uploaded my video I immediately got a notification that there was a copyright claim and I would not be allowed to monetize it (I had no intention anyway, and I credited the original songwriter in the video and in the description.), but that it’s not a copyright strike.
Wish I saw this more quickly, so I could have warned you. They will still check private videos. In fact, that’s one way content producers will check their videos to see if there are any copyright problems before switching them to public view.
If you want to upload a video for just your own personal use, you’re better off using one of the various file storage sites. Many will offer to stream the video if it is in a file format that browsers can play and that the site recognizes. I know both Google Drive and Dropbox do. The only issue is that you will usually have a file size limit, but you’d be surprised how small you can get your video with modern codecs.
Edit: and since your example was of Beatles music, it was almost guaranteed to be not playable, rather than YouTube just not allowing you to monetize it. The current owner of the Beatles is very stingy with allowing the song.
Other artist’s copyright owners may be less stingy, and allow the video as long as they can run ads on it.
I went with a private video on Vimeo, since it also has a Roku app. About half the songs I want to share with myself are Beatles songs, so it was a good test. And, I want to play them on my big TV which has a Roku.
My 2-3 minute song was almost a GB, so I used Handbrake to change it from a 1080P60 mp4 to a 720P60 MKV file, reducing it to less than 60MB. Any better advice on how to shrink it down?
I actually should have remembered that Vimeo is more lax with that stuff as long as you keep the video private. Glad you found them.
That depends. If you want an even smaller file, all I can recommend is reducing the framerate and then try lower bitrates, and see what you find acceptable. You might be able to get away with 1.5 Mbps at 720p24.
But if you want higher quality, then I have a lot of recommendations. That bitrate on that MP4 is quite high, and you could probably reduce it without actually lowering the resolution. YouTube recommends 12mbps (or 12000 kbps) for 1080p60 video, but used to recommend as low as 6mbps.
If you do want to cut anything down, I’d reduce the framerate before reducing the pixel size. Try 1080p30 or even 1080p24 and see if you like those. Then you can use 8 or even 4 mbps bitrate. You also could try changing to 720p30 or 720p24 at the same bitrate (about 2.8 mbps) and get higher quality videos.
What file type? Well, it really doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is the codec, and, since you’re using Vimeo, you should use H.264 (as that is what the site uses). You can use H.264 with MKV files, but it’s automatic with MP4 files. So I’d stick with MP4. You can still convert MP4 to MP4.
This is all general encoding info. For Handbrake specifically, the bitrate I’m talking about goes in the “Average Bitrate” box. And, to get the highest quality, enable 2-pass mode. This will be slower than Handbrake’s recommend “Constant Quality” mode with a single pass, but bitrate is more universal than Handbrake’s arbitrary quality settings.
That said, if you wanted to, you could just experiment with Constant Quality settings instead of Average Bitrate. Unfortunately, I can’t give you much guidance there, except that you should start with a number higher than 18 and lower than 30. And that a lower number means a larger file but better quality.
But, honestly, I’d stick with using bitrate unless the 2 passes were too slow for you.
I definitely want to keep it at 60 fps – they are videos of game play.
How about if we approach it from another direction – is 100 MB a reasonable size for a 4 minute video? I’m using the 720p60 Vimeo/Youtube setting on my (probably old) version of Handbrake. I guess I could easily switch to 480p60 – high resolution is less important than high frame rate for this usage.
No, it isn’t. But if your upload site doesn’t support h.265, you might be stuck to a large file (if not THAT large.)
I don’t use Handbreak, but you might want to try VirtualDub 2 (I’ve been using versions of that for probably pretty close to the 20 years that it has been out.) Then you want to look under the video compression settings at h.264 (okay) or h.265 (better, if the site supports it–YouTube does) and you want to then open the options for that format and choose video quality vs compression from there. It will be a little box with a number and a slider that moves it from 1 to 50-something. Default for h.264 is 23 and for h.265 is 28. Play around with that. Start with h.265 at number 30 and see if the size/quality is right for you. If it is too large or artifacty, bump it down a little to 28. If it is good, bump it up to 32 and see if it is still good or if it is getting artifacty. The speed setting determines how hard it looks for ways to compress the video. Higher speed can give smaller file sizes at a given quality level, but drastically slower conversions. You will probably be fine with leaving it at the default “fast.” (If your upload site doesn’t support h.265 try all the same things with h.264, except starting at 23 instead of 30.)
For audio, go with AAC. Start with 32 kbs/channel and see if that sounds good enough for you. If not, bump up to 48, then 64.
Vdub will also have every option you need for adjusting the resolution and framerate (along with tons of video and audio filters, all free.) There will be a bit of a learning curve and experimentation at first, but once you get something figured out you can use it on all your videos.
Thanks! I’m now creating videos that are more like 15-20 MB and definitely good enough quality. Vimeo can deal with h.265, so I’m using that.
If I were you I’d upload it to Vimeo in high quality, because Vimeo transcodes and recompresses it anyway. I mean it’s not worth uploading the uncompressed original, but a 1080p60 file is absolutely fine if compressed at a sane bitrate, or using VBR. You can try Google’s VP9 codec too and see if that compresses any better than H265.
If you’re a gamer and you have an nvidia card, make sure to turn on NVENC in Handbrake or whatever software you are using. That might dramatically speed up compression. Or if you have an integrated Intel graphics card, Quick Sync is also pretty fast.
The problem with uploading higher quality videos to Vimeo is that I’m capped at 500mb/week. The quality I’m using is just fine for my purposes anyway.
Thanks for that tip about NVENC! It’s more than twice as fast – 80-90fps -> 180fps.