Wetlook World Forum

YouTube convert every uploaded video to Flash Video format (FLV) so they will have a set bitrate (compression level) in use. If you feed it superlative quality video it will still end up output at whatever quality settings they've set their FLV encoder to use. You may well find that the low quality of cellphone cameras let them feel sanctioned to stick to low quality encoding to save on bandwidth, knowing that most people will only be sending low quality video anyway. I don't think YouTube was *supposed* to be used for pirate copies of commercial videos (be it music videos or produced wetlook).

However, the filming never helps. The camerawomen involved in the clips we watch just love waving the damn camera around like a maniac. Worse, smaller lenses seem to suffer so very badly from contrast problems -- where the sky ends up so wide it floods out the picture and everything else is black. With professional video, such as newsreel or produced wetlook you will generally find that you get a very well balanced image. That, and you don't get the huge amounts of grain that you get off the little camera in a phone, some of them do have a ridiculous signal to noise ratio. Another problem with cheap cams is that their pixel resolution is very low and you get all sorts of shared pixels and random data.

That said, I *have* seen some pretty reasonable stuff on YouTube, so I suspect that there will be user error involved as well as the effects of the necessary re-encoding.