YouTube Stabilize Video - Not always a good thing.

I did some video editing for a client. They provided me with several videos shot on-location without the use of a tripod. We went through found all of the cuts we were looking for and edited the video to make something really pretty cool and authentic looking. After adding all of the proper titles and fly-ins to the video I rendered the video down so it could be uploaded to YouTube. YouTube will not accept a 40gb raw file.

So I get a call today saying "The type in the video is going all over the place." I quickly opened all of the videos I provided the client to check, and they all appeared as expected. So I go onto YouTube and something crazy is happening with the video. I know all about JPEG and MPEG compression and what that does when you start increasing the compression level, but this was altogether different and wildly amusing (yet scary). They type was crawling across the screen and climbing into areas where I was sure there was no type. I looked at the formats I used to make sure I hadn't selected some hybrid in After Effects that used vector layers by chance (they're always upgrading things) and found no issue with the raster-only formats I was using.

YouTube has some excellent features and this one is supremely impressive. My client upon uploading the video decided to select the option to "Stabilize Video" in the video editor section of the YouTube Video Manager for their channel. The video shakiness was remastered to make the video look completely stable (like a professional videographer shot the footage). If you watched the off-camera areas in the shots they appeared a little strange having been cloned from shots where they existed prior and post. The type however was everywhere, so it made it look like a bad editing job. I mean really bad. It was super distracting. Luckily there's a way to tell YouTube to revert to the original video (you have to dig for it in the video editor settings). Upon selecting the "revert to original," after some time the original non-corrected/non-stabilized video *should* be in place. If this doesn't work you can always delete the video and re-upload the original.

Leave it to Google / YouTube and their new features and upgrades to really ramp up your learning curve. Luckily this time however the crisis was averted.