This past week I mastered several video clips taken at Seattle’s Fremont Solstice Parade and Honk! Fest West – all in 3D, most of them shot using a Sony TD10 3D camcorder.

When I watched them on Youtube they looked basically like over compressed crap. It did not seem to be matter if I used Sony Vegas or Magix Movie Edit to produce the file.

Tonight I did some experimenting and concluded that given two identical upload files (in terms of bit rates) to YouTube – but with one in side-by-side format and the other in top-over-bottom format, that the top-over-bottom format came out looking worse. Consistently.

This seems odd since the TD10 records two full 1920×1080/60i streams. When combining for 3D, we should be able to take the odd scan lines from one stream and the even scan lines from the other stream and not worry about de-interlacing since we only need half the scan lines.

Well, for whatever reason, the side-by-side looks noticeably better than the top-over-bottom after uploading to Youtube. Both formats looked fine on my 3D TV when I played them directly from the original MP4 files on a hard drive.

Recommendation: Use side-by-side format when uploading 3D to Youtube.

Would be interested to know if others have experimented with these formats?