Export settings for a YouTube drama
— the case of the GL film "Winter Cherry Blossoms, Spring Snow"
If you fell for your friend, what would you do?
A love story between two women, one of whom falls for her roommate.
To convey the distance between them, and the softness, I aimed for a tone close to Super 16mm.
Aiming for Super 16mm
At first I thought about going as far as "Blue Valentine," but recreating real 16mm tone and grain digitally tends to look cheap, so I settled on the current look.
One difficulty with YouTube dramas is that the image changes depending on the viewing environment. The way the grain reads depends on how YouTube compresses the file, so after a lot of trial and error, these are the settings I export with.
Export settings
Export settings in DaVinci Resolve.
DaVinci Resolve — Deliver
Format QuickTime Codec H.265 Hardware Acceleration ✅ Use hardware acceleration if available Resolution 3840 × 2160 UHD Frame Rate 24 FPS Quality Restrict to 100,000 Kb/s (100K Kb/s) Encode Multi-pass encode Key Frames Auto Data Levels FullWhy 4K at 100 Mbps
I push the bitrate to the practical maximum at 4K.
On an earlier vertical video, I had lowered the bitrate a little, and YouTube's compression turned it into an over-sharpened, almost HDR-looking image.
Exporting at the highest quality you can and letting YouTube do the compressing gives a cleaner final result.
About
We started "Virgin Kiss," a GL story series, as a sub-channel of Gossip Sugar.
Its first film, the short "Winter Cherry Blossoms, Spring Snow," premieres Thursday, May 22 at 7 PM JST.
Release
Short film "Winter Cherry Blossoms, Spring Snow"
Streaming from Thursday, May 22, 2026, 7:00 PM JST
Produced by Gossip Sugar Films
Planned, written, directed, shot and edited by Buzz Tyler
