Try this: record some GoPro footage while riding in your motorcycle. Upload it directly to YouTube from the hard drive. Does it look like Lego? If it doesn't then edit some of it in PD18. Produce it and then upload it to YouTube and compare. Let us know the result.

Thanks, tried that already. It was precisely because of the poor quality uploads direct that I paid for PD. I was hoping to improve on direct upload and Quik by paying for a customisable processing suite. Unimpressed so far, I have to say.

I have seen many motorcycle riding videos on YouTube that are pretty good at a low bitrate. In this video the motorcyle interior, windscreen, and objects ahead look very sharp because they hardly move. The blurring of the side movements are acceptable overall like in this one: https://youtu.be/qaBH-GGP8Pg . In hollywood films, it is the same that blurring of the objects at the sides are expected at 24 fps with a normal shutter speed of 1/50 sec.

Quote Thanks, tried that already. It was precisely because of the poor quality uploads direct that I paid for PD. I was hoping to improve on direct upload and Quik by paying for a customisable processing suite. Unimpressed so far, I have to say.

PD (or any software) can't create any higher quality video than what your source contains. The source quality is everything!

While you can adjust lighting, exposeure, contrast, sharpness, etc. in the details, if your source looks like anything like Legos, you've got a serious recording problem. What bitrate is yourt GoPro recording at? For an MP4 format, you need around 40Mbps for good quality HD/60p.

If everything looks great before uploading to YouTube, and that's the only place the quality degrades, please share a sample clip via OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. so other folks can take a look at what might be going on.

You may want to produce to the standard H.264 M2TS AVC 1920 x 1080/60p (28Mbps) format, which is what I always use for HD/60p YT videos. Note that MTS is a more efficient codec, so it can give you the equivalent quality as MP4 with 30% less data (40Mbps vs. 28Mbps).

I can't offer any technical words but if you are seeking further information on what can be achieved have a look at this site. The bloke who runs it does a lot of video evaluations and uploads to YouTube from action cameras etc. His opinion is that YouTube will always give you a lower quality product than that direct from the camera. He has a lot of action camera reviews, some probably quite old but it should give you an idea of what it could look like. http://www.techmoan.com/blog/category/action-cameras

@Optodata - "The source is everything" As originally stated, the source footage is perfect. I wasnt expecting PD to upgrade the quality, but by using its YouTube function to preserve it.

To be clear, there is no "YT function to preserve" quality, there's simply an abbreviated way to produce and upload in one step.

PD still has to produce your video, and you might want to double check that to see if the poor quality is present. Using CPU-only producing rather than using any hardware acceleration can noticeably improve the quality in some cases.

Also, no matter what format/quality you produce to using PD, YT will always convert it on their end into VP9, with a maximum bitrate of 12Mbps for HD/60 clips. There's no way around that, but it's sometimes possible to tweak your PD produce settings to reduce the VP9 blockiness when you produce first and then manually upload. That's why I suggested sharing a short clip.

YouTube/optodata

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You seem to be misinterpreting my posts. My original footage is perfect. I did not expect, as you seemed to imply, PD to improve this.
I did, however, expect it to preserve and not degrade it by using the built in YT settings.
Please re-read my original post.

650v2 - I beleive that you want to store your video online at the original quality. That is easily done with Vimeo as they accept and allow what they call the original quality downloads. Camera test websites uses them to host the "original" video sample files. Other users see it as a competitor to YouTube as their videos can be of much higher quality.

This page has some recommended guidelines for formats and bitrates to upload videos. They are not that high of quality and I imagine YT re encodes them in VP9 format which further degrades quality.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

When I first upload a video, it processes a few different versions. It seems to start with the lowest bit rate so if you view your video right after the upload processing is done, it will look blocky. Wait another few minutes to an hour and the other versions will be processed and have much better quality.