Rendering HD 60 FPS video with
MikuMikuDance, and upload it to YouTube!
Goedendag (good day) LearnMMD readers, I am parkeerwacht a Dutch MMD’er and I am new here on the team. I was wanting to share my techniques, for creating HD 60 FPS MMD videos and uploading them to YouTube.
There is still a lot that I have to learn about MMD, but Let’s learn together. :D
Introduction
Since YouTube supports 60 FPS videos these days, you must have seen a lot (or at least some) of MMD videos being uploaded in 60 FPS. (FPS stands for Frames Per Second, for the people who don’t know.) If you are like me and thought: Well why not set the frame-rate to 60FPS in MMD’s render options and you’re done, right? Well this is not everything you have to do. If you don’t use proper codecs and settings, the end result may be at a low quality. In this article I will be explaining how I render in 60 FPS step by step.
Sooo… let’s get started!
Step 1: Create an MMD animation.
What? You don’t know how to create an animation?
No problem, there many tutorials here on LearnMMD to help you with that, like creating a dance/music video. You can follow these instructions from our editor Reggie Dentmore in this article: Make an MMD Music Video Bo Beep Bo Beep! or find other things you can make here: https://learnmmd.com/StartHere/
Step 2: Let’s talk codecs.
Once finished with your animation, you must render it to an AVI, of course. AVI video is a container format, which means it can contain any codec you would like. (well not all, but I am not going into detail here because that will get very complicated.)
So which codec should I use?
Choosing a proper codec is what a lot of people forget when making videos in general (not just MMD). You may think it is as simple as picking any codec that you
Ut Video is a lossless codec, which means that whatever goes in, comes out. A lot of codecs are “lossy”, this means that there is quality loss after encoding. YouTube also uses a lossy codec.
The nice thing about this codec is, that it is both 32-bit and 64-bit. This means that this will work in 64-bit MMD. Most codecs I tried before only worked in 32-bit. So I had 2 MMD versions running. (64 and 32 bit) This codec is also fast at encoding 60 FPS video.
Ok so, where do I download this codec?
You can download the latest version (23.1.0 as of 07/04/2024) of Ut Video by clicking this link (the latest release is at the bottom of that page… use the .exe format, it installs UTV properly so that MMD can find it. )
Step 3: Rendering in 60FPS
using Ut Video
UPDATE: 29-04-2016: Due to a bug in Ut Video, the audio may get out of sync at some point in the video. A workaround is to lower the screen size in MMD, if you run into this bug.
Before you start rendering make sure your screen size is at least 1280×720 or YouTube won’t encode your video in 60 FPS, use this article from YouTube as reference for your resolution (screen size). There is a table on there that shows you the resolutions you can use. I selected 2560×1440
Rendering using this codec doesn’t differ from any other codec, except that you have to change some settings.
Do the following:
-
- Go to file (F)
- Click on render to AVI file (V)
- Choose where you want to save your video file.
- On the AVI-out screen change the following settings (or check the picture)
-
- Set frame-rate to 60 FPS.
Select UtVideo YUV422 BT.709 DMOas compressor. NOTE: YouTube prefers 4:2:0 subsampling to be uploaded, use YUV420 BT.709 DMO for faster processing by YouTube.
- Now click on the settings button.
- Select the following settings:
- Tick “Same as # of logical processors”
- Select “Optimize for compression ratio (Predict median)”
- Click on OK.
- Then click on OK to render.
This should render the video in proper 60 FPS! :D
IMPORTANT NOTE:
When using this codec make sure you have at least 40GB of free hard drive space. This codec outputs very large files. As you can see in the image this video is almost 26GB large.
We are going to fix this in the next step. I don’t know how long your video is, so 40GB is a good recommen-
dation.
Another note, Rendering may take a long time. Anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours. This depends on your screen size, the amount of MME effects that you have used and the speed of your processor and video card. I have a High End computer, so I was able to render this in 15-20 minutes.
Step 4: Transcoding the video to upload it to YouTube.
UPDATE 28-12-2016: I wrote a new guide on transcoding which can be found in this post, the instructions here were out of date. the post linked give you better results! Follow the information under H.264:
Using the right codec when Rendering to AVI in MMD
Step 5: Upload the final video to YouTube
I am not going very in-depth about this, because our author MMD-Nay-PMD has written an article about this: Uploading MikuMikuDance YouTube Videos MMD
Be sure to include 60 FPS in the title of your video, this will tell people who browse YouTube that your video is 60 FPS.
Also, because it is 60 FPS, you will have to wait a little longer for it to process. This is my result:
Some tips/notes:
Make sure to playback your video after rendering from MMD. If you use VLC, you can’t play it back. VLC also doesn’t support the codec. Use Windows Media Player instead. Do the same when you are done with transcoding.
Why go through all of these steps?
The reason for using this method is that, this way, you prevent YouTube from destroying your video after processing. It is also because direct H.264 codec in MMD 32 bit makes MMD crash (at least for me) This is because this codec doesn’t work well with the AVI format.
If you have any tips/suggestions, if you have used this article to render your videos, if you have any questions or if you have another method of processing your 60 FPS videos, please tell me in the comments. I like to answer questions and I am open to feedback.
This article was inspired by this post from Trackdancer on Deviant art I was browsing through his DeviantArt when I saw that post. You can read through some MME effects noted there but I was mostly interested in the codec.
So, this covers what I have discovered about rendering in 60 FPS in MMD.
Tot ziens (goodbye),
Parkeerwacht
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