Stop Uploading PS5 Pro Trailers to YouTube’s 1080p Wood Chipper

Ubisoft’s latest trailer for Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, intended to spotlight the game’s visual fidelity on the PS5 Pro, serves as a frustrating reminder of a persistent issue: 4K trailers simply do not thrive on YouTube. It raises the question of why developers continue to rely on such an inadequate medium to demonstrate what should be bleeding-edge graphical performance.

If you focus exclusively on Edward Kenway, the footage is passable—though even then, there are jarring moments, such as his hair flickering into a blurred mess around the 44-second mark. While the colors are vibrant and the frame rate appears fluid, the environment tells a different story. Distant foliage looks muddy, sand textures lose all definition, and unsightly digital artifacts plague the video at key intervals. Quite frankly, it is a subpar presentation.

The blame lies not with Ubisoft, but with YouTube’s aggressive compression algorithms. Every upload, whether to YouTube or Twitch, is compressed to manage file sizes and reduce bandwidth strain. This “squashing” of data inevitably degrades both audio and visual clarity, turning crisp details into smeared textures and producing that characteristic tinny, hollow sound in audio tracks.

YouTube’s rationale, of course, is accessibility—ensuring users with varying connection speeds can stream content reliably. While the platform has improved its handling of high-resolution video through superior transcoding methods like VP9, the underlying issue persists. The general consensus among creators is to avoid pre-compressing files and to upload the highest-fidelity source material possible, though even then, the platform’s heavy-handed processing remains an obstacle.

The core problem is the blind pursuit of the “4K” label. YouTube allocates significantly higher bitrates to 4K streams compared to 1080p, providing more “room” for the video data to breathe. Because Assassin’s Creed Black Flag on the PS5 Pro relies on upscaling rather than native 4K, developers have a missed opportunity here. They could, in theory, upscale 1080p footage to a 4K container before uploading. By “tricking” YouTube into granting a higher bitrate to what is effectively a 1080p source, the platform would be forced to handle fast-paced action much more gracefully, eliminating the blurriness seen in the current trailer.

Alternatively, downsampling high-resolution masters to 1080p can often result in a much cleaner, more stable image than a poorly compressed 4K upload. Regardless of the technical approach, the goal should be clarity. When developers release promotional content that misrepresents the actual visual quality of their product, it does a disservice to both the consumer and the meticulous work put into the game’s development.

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Source: Polygon