I'm a colorist that works on a lot of music videos with more than a few VMA's under my belt. It's not uncommon for us to deliver 1080p compressed masters (at t

I'm a colorist that works on a lot of music videos with more than a few VMA's under my belt. It's not uncommon for us to deliver 1080p compressed masters (at the labels request) despite having shot and finished in 4K or even 6K. Typically delivery specs to the label are 1080p ProRes 422HQ or DNxHD175 and an a 20mbps h.264 web "master." Unfortunately, youtube's compression kills things that are even uploaded with enormous master quality files. I recently did a video for a major artist that was shot primarily on 35mm film (some bits were 16mm and 3.2K Alexa) but the uploaded versions look terrible despite coming from high quality files. This is due in part to the subdued, low contrast color palette and heavy grain we went with - both of which are problematic for youtubes codecs which seem to be optimized for high contrast, rich color, grain less video. In this case, even though we have gorgeous masters now - the version on YouTube is a far cry from what we've screened in theaters, festivals, and on television. And this is after conference calls with Vevo and YouTube engineers who end up just apologizing and unable to do anything about it. Frustrating. Of course this true to some extent for every video we upload, but some are much worse than others. Vimeo does not really have this problem (or not nearly as much) for what it's worth.