PROPERLY Export Action Cam Footage For YOUTUBE + INSTAGRAM

So you've gone out and done the action sports  thing you filmed something really really cool on your action camera and you're like dang that's  awesome looks great on the back of the camera looks good on your computer and then you go and  try and share with your friends on YouTube or on Facebook or on Instagram or whatever and it looks  like PooPoo Kaka well in this video we are going to fix that I'm going to bring you through my  post- production pipeline I'm going to try and keep it as simple

as possible and effective as  possible so that you can take the footage that you film with your action camera make it look even  better after to the fact and have the right export settings so that when you upload it to whatever  platform you want to upload it to the video and that platform will play nicely together and  it'll look great so let's go and it doesn't matter what kind of action camera you're using  it doesn't matter what kind of computer you're using you should be able to do what I d

o in the  same program as me no matter what even if you're working off of an iPad okay so filming is done  you're back at your place you've got the memory card um the next thing you got to do is take it  off that memory card put it on the hard drive on your computer well I'll just say this even if  that footage is just a little bit important to you and you would like to keep it around have  two copies of it because one of those copies will fail hard drives and computers go all the  time SD cards

fail all the time ask me how I know so you've got your files on your computer  I've got some example footage here that we'll be working with but there are two different kinds  of video files out there there's one where you're using a single lens camera like that little guy  there that Ace Pro and that's great your video files ready to be put into your video editor  to get color graded and exported all that kind of stuff or you sh with a dual lens camera like  this insta 360 X3 and in that case

you've got to put it in that case you've got to put it into  a separate program and you've got to turn it from a 360 sphere into a 16x9 or 9x6 rectangle  and so really really fast before we dive into my editing and color grading uh software I just  want to show you what I do as far as exporting a file and the settings for that so this is uh  again I use insta 360 cameras so that's what we're going to be showing you here this is a  chin mounted X X3 on my chin there's my chin um and so here I am

on the trail and I've got  the X3 set up and we've got it in 16x9 format obviously you can change that do whatever you  want this is a 360 camera go crazy all right so I'm going to put this where I want it and we're  going to export it out so because so the thing is um when you're dealing with uh 360 footage uh so  you might have an X3 or whatever and that's like 5. 3K 5.7k I'll have to double check on that uh  tons of resolution but we're talking about that amount of pixels over the entire 360

sphere but  we're only taking like a little rectangle out of that and so if you want like the highest quality  output possible you got to use as many of those pixels as possible and so I find I try to export  with as much of a wide field of view as I possibly can if you're finding that you're always punching  way into your footage like this if you're always always always doing Mega punched in stuff that's  not the strength of a 360 camera it's not what they're made for it's just the quality is g

oing  to degrade too too much whereas if you're getting a a ton of pixels in there by having a wider shot  looks pretty dang good but yeah if you're always wanting to punch in just don't use a 360 camera  or at least use it in single lens mode because that'll be better quality overall for that um  or use a single lens camera so anyways going to include a whole bunch of pixels and we're going  to go export this thing call it tester tester one horizontal so I have a preset here um here's the  thin

g so when you when you actually are exporting 360 footage when you're taking out that little  tiny chunk out of there it's not the resol actual resolution of it is not going to be more much more  than 1080p but when you're exporting it you export it as a larger file size so instead of you know  1920 x 1080 I've got it at 3840 X 2160 which is Ultra HD or most people call 4K and if I want  absolute maximum quality I export and proes 422 it'll be a pretty dang big file size but I'm just  doing smal

l Clips so it doesn't really matter to me um and then I go on export and this will give  me the very best starting point possible for 360 footage now if you want to retain a lot of the  quality but you just don't want to deal with the massive file sizes from that prores stuff do  h265 or h264 uh but when you do that juice up the bit rate to at least 100 start the export bingo  bango that's a 360 export side of things let's uh dive into my editing and color grading and  exporting program of choic

e Bam um oh look at this guy okay so I use Da Vinci resolve I've been  using Da Vinci resolve since 2014 I think so 10 years now if you're not already totally stuck  into a different editing program actually even if you already are D Vinci resolve just do it  it's the best one it's the best one there are pros and cons to all different pieces of software  but this one for one is free and you get like 95% of everything well really 100% of everything you'd  ever need unless you get like really Pro

into some things you can go and download your own software D  Vinci resolve software right now for nothing and I think they even have an iPad app for it now too  so that's what we're going to be using today as the software but you can do the exact same thing  pretty much the exact same things I'm doing on any other software as well like Final Cut or uh  Premiere Pro if anybody's using that anymore so this is the very last video that I put out on the  channel I'm going to make a whole new project

for this so I can show you everything I do just to  give you an example of what I do as far as my main camera and having to color grade that which  is filming right now this is what it looks like to begin with that's what I'm working with and then  we make it look like that let's make a whole new project Okay so we've opened up the project and  this is what we're going to do first we're going to go up to file and we're going to go to Project  settings you have to set up your project settings ri

ght from the get-go it's not that difficult you  just got to do it right um so we're talking about horizontal YouTube export right now and so I'm  going to go 3840 X 2160 Ultra HD even if you shot your footage in 1080P but we'll talk about that  later um I shot in 24 frames a second so we're going to have a 24 frames per second timeline if  you shot in 30 frames per second go and check put it in 30 frames per second color management this  is the other one two down over in color management um we'

re going to keep this super super simple  there's so many crazy complicated ways of doing this but we're going to leave it really really  simple we're going to check use separate color space and Gamma and timeline color space we're  going to make it Rec 709 pretty basic and then on the output guess what guess what Rec 709 and  the gamma this is important I'm going to assume that this shows up on PCS as well but we're  going to go Rec 709a for your gamma not gamma 2.4 like you nerds are going to

tell me down in  the comments it doesn't look right re 709a for YouTube and Instagram okay hit save and here  we are ready to make some movie Magic anytime you start using a new program it can seem super  overwhelming but trust me I've been using this for 10 years now and I honestly I I am no expert  at this program I essentially do like 10 things in this and then I kick out my videos because I  don't need to do anything more than that you've got down at the bottom here we've got all the  pages

there's a media page cut page edit page fusion color Fair light deliver um because I'm  an old man and I started using this before the cut page even existed I use the edit page this is  where I do all of the editing if you were new to D Vinci resolve I think it's totally worth looking  into the cut page it sounds great but old dog no new tricks thank you okay so I'm just going  to take my footage and I'm just going to drag it over here underneath the master folder Boop  and then it's just in the

re easy that now if I want to throw them all down on the timeline where  where I can actually like do things with them I'm just going to take them all and I'm going to drag  them on there and now they're on the timeline you see not not difficult so we've got a few different  examples here we've got something for snow we got vertical we got horizontal we're going to start  with this one so we've got these two clips here and both of these clips were actually in the  very last video so may as well

keep this on uh on topic turn that down holy moly okay here we go  this is uh me riding it's pretty cloudy outside uh it's pretty dreary out there at the moment and  this was when I was really trying to zero out the camera I just wanted to leave it on basically  stock settings and this is probably where a lot of people watching this video are going to be  starting from they left their their white balance on auto and a bunch of other things just kind of  let it do its thing so this is similar to

probably what a lot of people are working with let's see  here now we're going to go and color grade this thing I'm going to make it look extra good now  as I said before um okay we're just going to get rid of all of this stuff all right there we  go cleared it out now we've got a bigger screen to work with so again I had this camera set into  a lot of the auto settings including Auto white balance and it doesn't matter how smart the camera  is I've said this so many times before it's very very

rare that a camera will get the white balance  right including in this scenario so in this clip um the camera is seeing a whole lot of green and  a whole lot of red and that's just what it looked like naturally and so the camera itself is going  there's so much green and so much red I have to balance this out it's just going to dump a  whole bunch of blue into the image like way too much blue to try and balance out the white  balance and now it looks bad and I can tell it looks bad because I kno

w one this is not what  it looked like in real life two I know that my Ibis Oso paint does not look like that it does  not look anywhere near that cool it looks like there's almost no green in it whatsoever when I  know it's pretty green so we are going to balance this image out and it's uh really not that hard  to do there's these little circles over here one's a Target looking thing here and the other one's  a Target looking thing it says HDR they're both super useful we're just going to go to

the regular  Target looking one and over here is temperature and tint and so one of the things I want to do is  I want to bring the green back because it took out so much green and so I'm going to take tint and  you can see if I scroll to the left we're going to be adding Green in and taking away some of the red  and you can see it on the Scopes there too let's see here okay right about to where the trees look  a lot more realistic and my bike starting to look green again somewhere around there

now I'm going  to add in some warmth with the temperature slider right about there I think oh I'm trying to get  I'm trying to make the ground look Brown again because the ground is like pretty brown right  about there and you can take little hints from like things around in and around the scene and  so for example like my pants I know what my pants look like and what sort of brown they should look  like and you got to trust your eyeballs on that but then two even even if you just look at my st

em  before the stem looked way too cold um but now it looks balanced actually balanced all right cool  next up um we're going to adjust the exposure a little bit this is actually isn't too too bad but  see all these squiggly lines over here these are your Scopes they're called Scopes and it's telling  you where all the different colored pixels are in the image and how they're kind of spread across  a brightness range the higher up you are on this little chart or graph um The Brighter it is and 

the lower the lower it is or the darker it is and so for me I'm going to use lift gamma gain that's  basically just like Shadows midtones highlights and I am going to raise this up a little bit raise  up the Shadows just a touch and I always like to play around with midtones because I find that for  whatever reason it doesn't matter what brand but um a lot of the times action cameras just kind of  like wash out the midtones and so anytime that I can bring a little bit more like a little more  oo

mph into the midtones everything looks better now if you go over to the little Target that says  HDR under underneath of it sometimes depending on the camera you can go over and so now we got Dark  Shadow light don't worry about the global one um and then we can click this and you have access  to even more highlight and specular so now these things are getting now we're getting like really  really bright up there so highlight and specular that's like dealing with like the bright spots in  the sk

y and so I want to try and bring down the exposure for highlights and see what happens  oh see there you go yeah so even though I've brightened up the image a lot I can still control  just the really bright spots in the sky over there and bring them under like so so that they're not  clipping because if you're touching the very top you're clipping and you've lost your data and  you can also like let's say if we're looking at you know the ground and everything and my bike  looks right but then no

w like the sky looks a little bit weird like it's it's too brown or  something or the stem were to look too brown but everything else looks great you can go into  and specifically Target the highlight sections and you can just like pull the saturation down  just in those highlight sections so then your the sky in the stem which is silver can look  a little bit more neutral so I'm going to pull that down just a little bit none of the stuff  that I did over in the HDR Wheels is all that necessary

I honestly I pretty much do everything  over here Shadow midtones highlights mess around with them before after before after now when  it comes to sharpness anytime I am setting up one of my action cameras I always set sharpness  to low whatever the very lowest setting is on the camera that's where I set it to because I'm  going to do the the sharpening after the fact I don't want it to look too crunchy so I know that  the sharpness was set to low on this camera when I shot this so I'm going to

go over to this is  super confusing there's a lot of different ways you can sharpen your your footage but I'm just  going to do the absolute most simple way we're going to go to something called blur then you're  going to take radius of blur again I don't know you take the blur radius and you drop it down by  like to 48 or 49 it depends it was a pretty dark day and so I know the iso was cranked up a little  bit so there's going to be more digital noise in there the more digital noise you have th

e less  you want to sharpen because it it brings out all that digital noise and makes it look worse so  I'm just going to add just a little tiny bit of sharpening H let's do 048 sharpen it up just  a little bit before after before after great all right now another thing I want to add  is some saturation so I've gone back over to the little Target wheel there we're going  to add a little bit of saturation to it yeah that actually looks more like my frame so  let's see where we're at let's try and

look at a few different more places yeah so this  is before and that's after before the snow looks way too blue with some red in there  too and now it looks how it looked in the moment turn it off Boop that's off and that's on  pretty big difference and it really didn't take that much time so that one's good to go and lots  of times when I have a whole bunch of multiple clips I'll just go and take that color grade  that I did on that one and I can hit command C or control C and then if you're i

n the color  page you can just click the next clip and then hit command V or control V and just paste the  same settings and it'll probably be great you might have to make a couple little tweaks but  for the most part it's good this is a helmet cam View and again we're in Auto white balance here  and once again it's just seeing a ton of green and red and so it takes out all the green and  red and you're left with almost no color which is really too bad so on this one I believe the  sharpness was

already set to medium and so I'm going to leave sharpness on that one it's already  looking slightly crunchy but now I'm going to do the exact same thing I did with the other one  just a little bit faster so first things first we're going to take some tint we're going to add  some green back in there cuz it was way too red red and then some temperature we're going to warm  it back up to where the woods look like the woods again that was a little bit too much green so  I'm going to add a touch m

ore red in and again all I'm doing is trying to make it look how it  looked to my eye in the moment um this one is I'm going to add a little bit of contrast so this  one here that's contrast and you can just click it and you can slide it up or down add a little  bit more or less contrast and I'm not really clipping out on the sides there's a little bit  of highlight clipping going on but not too bad and we can go and test that actually let's add  some saturation first add a little saturation in

there it's about there it's bit warm like that  see what's going on with the midtones oh yeah see you dip the midtones down a little bit and  everything just looks like it just looks like so much more body to everything so I'm going to  drop that down bring up the shadow just a little bit and that's looking pretty good there Touch  Too Much contrast bring it down just a little bit right maybe a little bit more saturation B  that's before and that's after before after and you can really tell like

so this is a before  shot and if you look at the Scopes over here this little bit here is that's the snow over in  this area and you can see that the blue the blue channel is way way way way too high you see all  the blue there and then it's green and then it's red and now that I've balanced it out I actually  wasn't looking at the Scopes when I did this but I probably should have been but I got it anyways  um let's go turn it back on and now you can see all those colors are lining up with each

other  so that's how you know that the snow is actually white so that's great okay back this out a little  bit so those are those two clips done and dusted and they're going to match each other pretty  well let's uh let's try a snow example here all right so in a situation like this on a snowy  overcast day the number one thing that you kind of have to really pull out of the footage is some  contrast because there's just no contrast on the snow it all just looks blah white so here we go  um our

white balance was set on this one but we did set it assuming that the sun would be out  a little bit more than it was and so you can see it's a little bit cool but it's not too bad  it's pretty neutral but yeah there's just not a lot of contrast going on in there so let's go  into here and you can see right away again if you look on your Scopes it's so useful to use  these Scopes you can immediately see that this you know these three thick white lines at the top  that's the snow and so you auto

matically already see that the snow is way too cool looking so if  you actually wanted to make the Snow White and how you would have seen it with your own eyes  well let's use this temperature slider and we brought that oh see look at that difference  hey such a big difference brought it down to there and that I mean that's really it and then  uh let's see tint slider now you know what that was pretty good I'm going to leave it right about  there and so now the snow looks like nice perfect white

snow we're going to try and pull a little  bit of contrast out of that snow let's see what we can do first I'm going to stick with these um  color wheels here the primaries they're called and again this one it basically is like midtone  and so sometimes I just want to like move things around and see what comes out of the image as  I Wing these settings around so as I bring this down I start to see a little a little bit more  contrast in the snow and so what if I what if I brought the mid tones

down but then I brought the  highlights up and the Shadows up just a little bit too see what that's done for us right so already  um this was before and now this is after so I've brought up the brightness of the snow we fixed  the color of the snow so it actually is white um but even though I brought up the brightness we've  actually managed to bring out more contrast in it as well so you can start to see more Contours in  that snow for after now let's see here I think we could go brighter it'll

separate things out even  more going to bring up the midtones just a little tiny bit we're going to bring up the saturation  cuz my jacket is yellower than that there we go and so you got to roll through and make sure it's  not going to be peeking out at all like as far as like the highlight's getting way too bright  and it is just a little bit so I'm going to bring down the highlights Touch This Is Us just  absolutely on The Struggle Bus we' never ridden any of this before yeah yeah that's not

bad it  it levels out pretty good the other thing that you can do with this actually first let's just go  and sharpen by going to the Blur tab and bring it down to it's going to be nice and clean so we can  sharpen this a little bit more without it looking too crunchy so we're going to go 47 I'm going to  try and get a little bit more detail in the snow so I'm going to start playing around oh see look  if you play around with those High mids for snow footage you can see as I drop this down look

at  all the detail in the snow obviously other parts of the image are going to be too dark now but  that's not bad so let's bring it down to like there and try and balance it back out again by  so I'm going to bring up that just a little bit bring that up so now we've brought down just  that one little tiny part of the Highlight range see before and after before two blue  very washed out no detail to having actually like decently colored snow my jacket looks  right and we've got way more detail

in the snow and it's nice and sharp too great all  right moving on all right so these are the X3 um 360 shots that we exported out of the insta 360  desktop program I wanted to show you this because again we didn't do anything to the footage after  the fact I didn't add anything to the footage in the insta 360 app uh the desktop app or anything  like that this is just how it it came out of the camera and I want to show you this because this  is how Stuff typically looks when I'm filming I work

to set up my camera settings so that I can  capture really nice looking footage like this and basically have to do nothing so when I shot  this I set my white balance according to what it looked like out there on that day and I'm pretty  sure on this day I set it to about 6,000 Kelvin and I set my EV compensation a little bit low so  that I wouldn't be blowing out the highlights and I know a lot of you have experienced this  kind of situation with your action camera footage when you're in really

super contrasty a  filming situation like this one often times the the darker areas are super crushed and there's  no more detail and at the same time all the Highlight details are super blown out and there's  no detail and it looks really bad um but for this at least on the X3 if I put it to like minus Z  0.5 EV and I leave it in Vivid mode it does a really nice job of hanging on to the highlights  and the shadows and this is a similar thing with uh other cameras as well so you can see in this

  image let's go back to the color page here there is there is a lot of contrast but it's pretty well  controlled so I don't have to worry about getting like bringing down the highlights too too much but  I could I can go over to the HDR wheels go over to highlight there it is if I want to just bring down  just some of that some of those hot spots so I can bring down that highlight area just a little bit  right to there and then if I really really want to I can go move it down into dark and Shad

ow  I can bring up the Shadows just a little tiny bit and I'm going to go and sharpen it because  I know that it was on sharpening low and it was a nice bright sunny day so the iso was nice and  low so I'm going to go 48 on this one and to be honest we're good here it looks good it's  ready to go so that's that's my typical workflow when I have you know full control over  my footage I just set my camera up well and I don't have to deal with it and I've got  plenty of camera setup videos already

on this channel I'll link some down below for you  and of course it's the same for the horizontal footage so we've got this footage here pretty much  didn't really need anything to it at all and we've got this footage here before and after like dang  and then uh we've got these guys here for after I actually probably bring that up a little bit for  the exposure but and there's that before and after okay cool honestly when it comes to action cameras  you generally don't really have to do anything

to your audio especially if you set it up with like  how I set it up in the last video again Link in the description all the action camera companies  or most of the action camera companies nowadays do such a nice job with not clipping the audio and  it's it's all pretty balanced it's nice so we're not really even going to worry about uh changing  up the audio so much but all right so let's do a 4K export for YouTube so horizontal let's see  what's up all right we're just going to go like this i

n andout points uh you have to set your in  andout points when you go to export something so I went to the beginning of this clip and I hit  the I button for in and I went over here and I hit the o button for out now it knows what part  of your project you are expor in so it doesn't export the entire thing so you come up here you  name the project let's throw it onto the desktop now when you're exporting for YouTube it doesn't  matter if you filmed in 1080P or in 1440 or in 2.7 or any other reso

lutions you're going to export it  in Ultra HD settings and the reason for that is is that YouTube will treat your video so much better  versus a 1080p file when YouTube sees that you're uploading a 4K file its background encoders give  you a lot more bit depth to work with and you're just going to get a much better looking image  no matter what even if it's 1080P and you're Uprising it to 4K and let's say you're watching  it in 1080p on YouTube after the fact it's still going to look way better

than if you exported it  at 1080P and uploaded it at 1080p cuz for whatever reason at that resolution or lower YouTube gives  you a lot less bits to work with so um I'm on a Mac I'm going to use QuickTime format now this one  depends on your system I always export an h265 and we are going to always is make sure that's in  3840 by 2160 Ultra HD and so all of my footage was shot in 24 frames per second and so the frame  rate on the way out I'm going to kick it out to 24 frames a second now here's

a really really really  really really really important part to all this it is the quality or the kilobits per second most of  the time it'll be set to automatic I don't think so Tim uh we're going to put it to restrict to so  that it will only export it at I think personally for 4K footage on YouTube when you're uploading  it to YouTube they'll tell you that you don't need more than like 25,000 kilobits per second or  25 megabits per second whatever you want to call it but I like to go 80 or ab

ove and especially  when there's a lot of fast motion that's when you need more bits flying around and so let's say for  this one I'm actually going to make it well it's h265 so you don't have to do as high so I'm I'm  going to do 80,000 kilobits per second um I don't want to optimize for Speed I want to optimize  for Quality so I don't really care about that we're going to go to encoding profile as Main  and multipass encode I heard from somebody that like on some PCS or whatever there's no opt

ion  for multipass I don't know if that's changed now or not that was a few years ago but if you have  the option for a multipass in code do it it makes your footage look way way better and then down  here we're going to go color space and Gamma tag same as project because we already set that up for  rec 79 and Rec 709a for the gamma and once you've done all of that you can hit add to render queue  sitting over here and it's not it's not rendering yet you got to hit render off Ding and away we g

o  all right so that has been rendered and when you do that multi-pass incode you got to remember that  it'll do like a pass through your footage and then it's going to start from the beginning again and  do a second pass a multi-pass incode and so yeah you're going to have a bigger file and it's going  to be a larger file to upload to Youtube but again if you're wanting to share this with people in in  the kind of quality that you see on your computer there's literally no other way to make this

happen  so now vertical export let's check out what we have to do for that we we've got our vertical file  over here and lots of times like if you're just putting out vertical content when you go and start  your new project you can set it to be vertical right away but one of the things we often do is  after we've done our YouTube edit now it's time to cut uh an Instagram cut for promotional stuff  or whatever so for this I just fire up a whole new timeline so it stays within the same project  a

nd I unclick use project setting settings so that that way I can go and use vertical resolution  we're going to make this uh Ultra HD there it is lovely so now you've got a whole new timeline all  your stuff just disappeared and you're freaking out don't worry it's still all there you can  go up to this area here and you go back to your old timeline just like that which is still in  horizontal format by the way and you can go and just copy whatever you want to put onto your other  timeline paste

it in there there we go and so this was exported out of the insta 360 app at 2160 X  3840 and this project timeline is set to the same res so everything fits perfectly you don't have  to do anything with that and for our export let's go over to the deliver tab inpoint outpoint done  now this is a little bit different and this is important when it comes to YouTube the name of the  game with that is give YouTube the very highest quality format and version that you possibly can  throw a giant vide

o file at YouTube and you'll probably get a decent output out of it on the  other end but when it comes to social media apps and let's take Instagram as an example as a prime  example the Instagram encoders hate with a passion anything that doesn't exactly fit their parameters  basically like there's a pipeline that it uses and if your video doesn't exactly perfectly fit that  pipeline it's going to manhandle that footage and ually destroy it and it's going to look really  Pixy and awful even if

you throw a really highres file at it it's not going to like it it's not  going to like it at all and so when it comes to social media apps you need to give it exactly what  it wants for the finished product so that it needs to touch your footage as little as possible as it  goes through that encoding Pipeline on their end so name it whatever you're going to name it put it  wherever you're going to put it and for Instagram I usually go h264 on this one um Instagram runs  runs at 30 frames a sec

ond in general uh but we're going to do 24 anyways if you're shot it in  30 exported in 30 it's it's the best frame rate for for Instagram but uh anyways so as far as the  quality goes we are not going to Max this thing out over 80 or 100,000 we are going to put it  at 25,000 kilobits per second or 25,000 megabits not megabytes megabits per second yes there a  difference yes it's stupid so yeah we're going to change this down to 1080 by 1920 um vertical  resolution make sure that box is clicked

because that resolution is exactly what Instagram wants  right now uh yeah we've got our 25,000 kilobits or 25 megabits per second we're going to go multipass  incode always multipass incode if you can color Space Tag gamma tag that's all good re 79 and  re 709a that is perfectly fine after all that's said and done add to render q and hit render and  that my friends is all there is to it thanks for watching everyone I am going to drink this coffee  and then yeah I think I'm gonna go for a ride