Exporting 4K video from Final Cut Pro to YouTube

My wife and I launched our YouTube channel @curtiscreations2024 to showcase the outpost designs she creates in Starfield. She has a real passion for building and decorating these virtual outposts, and we decided to share her work with the Starfield community so other players can discover and enjoy her unique designs.

We bought an Elgato 4K X and using OBS Studio we capture the video. This is then imported in to Apple’s Final Cut Pro. We wanted the upload to YouTube to be as good as possible. We are capturing in 4K.

I was using the settings below to export from Final Cut Pro on my M4 Mac Mini Pro. The files that were created were very large and took hours to upload to YouTube. YouTube never complained and the quality was great.

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These settings create very large files

I was seeing other content creators post to YouTube within a few minutes of a game update or other news. That got me wondering, how can they do this? Our files would be far to large to update that quickly. I didn’t want to spend time exporting video, uploading to YouTube to test different settings, so I ask ChatGPT. I am now using these settings.

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Much smaller files with the same quality

I exported a project that was previously making a 96GB file with the old setting, it is now less that 2GB with no loss in quality. Uploading it to YouTube we could see no difference.

I will still use the old settings so I have an archived version of the project, but I will use the HEVC settings to create the file for YouTube.