Best Export Settings for YouTube 2020 [Adobe Premiere Pro CC]

Key Takeaways

welcome back to the channel I'm Michael Bryan and in this video I'm gonna show you guys the best export settings you can use on Premiere Pro when you're trying to make a video and export it for YouTube now I've been using Premiere Pro for quite some time now and honestly I think my videos even though they're 1080p I think they generally look pretty good now I've been using settings that a lot of other people use so this is a very common thing to use on YouTube when you're trying to export your videos and make them look as good as possible now if you don't use the right settings when you export your videos could be glitchy or blurry or lower quality or otherwise degraded from the quality that the camera actually captured so it's important that you have the right settings now when you're using Adobe Premiere Pro the settings can be confusing and that's why in this video I'm gonna go through all the different settings that I change when I go and export a video as well as all the settings that I don't change from the preset so that way if you ever make a mistake and accidentally bump a setting and change it you can go back through this video and find out you know what the settings are supposed to be so you can export it properly and have a good looking video so let's jump over to my laptop now okay so here we are on my laptop and as I said I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro in 2019 now if you're using this in 20 20 or 20 21 I doubt you're gonna really have that much of a difference if it looks way different for whatever reason you can totally disregard this but I think the settings are gonna be the same that you're looking for it's gonna be the same general settings although they might be in slightly different locations I really don't think they will though because in 2017 and 2018 the settings were almost exactly where they are today so when you have your video right here I have one that's actually unedited but when you're done editing the video you can either go up and choose to you go to file and down to export and hit you know media right there or you can hit ctrl M and essentially what you gonna do then is it's going to just take the whole video everything you have there unless you accidentally selected a certain section and I'll talk about that in a minute but it's bring he's gonna bring into this window right here where you can change a lot about your video now of course as you see this is a very intimidating window if you don't know enough about it if you don't know what's all these words means or these settings you could definitely screw up a lot and not know how to export your video so to make it really simple the first thing you want to do is go to your format and change it to h.264 that's what you want when you're uploading to YouTube you want to make sure you're using that file format if you're doing anything else you know maybe you want to use these other ones but I always use h.264 now the second thing you want to do is go down and match the bitrate to what you actually want now here it says you can match the source which is great if you want to do that that'll definitely work what I typically do is because we're uploading to youtube you can go down they actually have a nice preset here which is going to be YouTube 1080p full-hd now if you're of course using 4k you can go and do that right here if I choose 4k right now and my camera captured it in 1080p it will export a 4k video but essentially what you're doing is you're just quadrupling all the pixels that already exist and it's you know it's opera's to 4k but that doesn't mean the quality of course is gonna change it just means the file is gonna be a lot larger for no reason so I don't recommend doing that instead choose whatever the input is so for my camera I'm shooting most of my videos in 1080p and therefore I want to export it in 1080p that obviously makes a lot of sense then you go down to output name and it doesn't really tell you that you can select this and change it but if you just click on the blue part it'll open up your folder and you can go and put it wherever you want now this is from my other channel right there so if I just say I want to call it I don't know just video video one I'll do that typically I choose a more specific name for these so I can find them later and know exactly what my video is but if you want to keep simple name so you can you know organize them by date or something you can always add comments right there so you can find out a little bit more about the video without having to watch the whole thing just a cool little thing you can do right there now as we go down let's go into effects first now effects I don't actually change anything as you can I'll scroll down you can see there's nothing selected here these are all just whatever is already there I'm not changing anything special about this and so yeah a lot there but I didn't change anything if you go to video then this is where you want to first make sure that the dimensions right here are correct if you're using a different aspect ratio or if you're using maybe like 4k or something you're gonna see different numbers right here the dimensions are you know pixels by pixels so 1920 by 1080 is what I use based on my camera you can always just click match source right there if you have any problems it should be really straightforward and simple to do that now as you go down you really don't have to change any of these settings but take note of them if yours look different you may want to adjust them say look like this generally the YouTube 1080p preset up there should be changing all these to what you see right here now the one that I do change is actually this one the bitrate encoding now I change it to vbr 2 pass now you can go down and do that and essentially you have these two different options right here now you can change them and say the maximum bitrate you can crank that all the way up if you want or you can have it at anything in between generally I just bring it up higher it's not going to really affect your file size but your target bitrate is what's going to affect your file size now you can see right here you can move it back and forth and it's going to change your file size so when I let it go it's up to 600 megabytes for this one little clip I'm editing right now if I bring it all the way up it's gonna be a couple gigabytes so right there two gigabytes for this video you're not really gonna see that much of a difference so the preset I think is around 16 sometimes you might want to move it up so like 20 or something but of course you're not gonna see a major difference in that generally I don't even touch those to be honest but if you want to that's definitely something you can change now this is not a vr video I'm not gonna change any advanced settings the next thing you want to do is go over to audio and again in audio I'm not changing anything because it's mostly my videos it is me talking so I'm not worried that much about you know like the absolute quality and the bitrate of me talking you know that doesn't matter quite as much to me if you're doing music or something you might want to worry a little bit more about this next in multiplexer here you want to make sure it's mp4 and standard that's pretty easy to keep track of and then captions you know what to do much and publish I don't worry about that because I'm publishing it later on YouTube just by uploading the video now the last thing you want to do is click use maximum render quality and then you don't have to do anything else here if you don't want to and then you just click export and it'll export your video to the folder that you specified right here to the name that you specified there as well so I'm not gonna export right now I'm gonna cancel and I want to show you something else earlier I mentioned that you want to make sure you don't accidentally export only one part of your video and so I kind of cut it up a little bit here just to show you if it's an edited video and you accidentally hit the letter X on your keyboard it'll sort of highlight just one specific spot right there and what its gonna be great if you want to do anything like rendering so if you have a lot of edits in one little area you can drag the in and the out markers and then you can go and render that area but if you go and hit ctrl M or if you go up to file export it'll open the window and you'll see right here it's only 51 megabytes now remember this entire video should be 500 megabytes the reason that you're only exporting this one little amount right there it's actually because you selected that with an in and an out marker now this is something that I struggled with when I first started using Premiere several years ago now what you really want to do is go up to markers and go down and clear in and out before you export that way you'll make sure you export the entire video every single time so guys if you enjoy this video or actually if you have any other questions about this please remember to go down and comment let me know I'll try to help you guys of course I'm not you know I can't tell you every single answer to everything in Premiere Pro but I have been using it for a while so I'm gonna try to help you guys as you're starting to get you know going with your YouTube careers here and get your channels growing it's really you have the best quality when you export because it's something so easy to do why would you degrade your videos in the very last step so thank you all for watching guys don't forget to Like and subscribe if you enjoy this video I'll see you next time