What should I check before uploading a YouTube video?
A short, specific list of what to check before you upload to YouTube: loudness, peaks, voice over music, exposure, pacing, the hook, captions and export settings. Plus three honest ways to run the whole thing.
By Thomas, founder of CutScore · Updated June 2026
I have uploaded videos I was proud of, only to watch them back on YouTube the next morning and wince. The audio was a touch quiet. The music crept over my voice in one section. A caption clipped off the bottom edge on mobile. None of it was a disaster, but all of it was avoidable, and all of it screamed "homemade" to anyone who did not already like me.
The problem is that you are the worst judge of your own upload. You watched every frame twenty times in the edit, so your ears stopped noticing the quiet voice and your eyes filed the green skin tone under "fine." Worse, your gear lies. Laptop speakers flatter the bass. Your phone at full brightness in a dark room makes an underexposed shot look gorgeous. Then a stranger watches on a cheap phone on a sunny bus, and the video sounds like a stairwell.
So a pre-upload check is not about perfectionism. It is about catching the few things that quietly cost you the view. Looking is not the same as checking. Looking is a vibe. Checking has targets. Here are the targets that matter for YouTube, in the order I run them.
The eight-point check before you upload to YouTube.
Screenshot it, tape it to your monitor. Every line has a target you can actually hit, and every one is something a viewer will clock if you skip it.
| Check | Target to hit | What it costs you if you skip it |
|---|---|---|
| Loudness | ≈ −14 LUFS | Too quiet and the video feels small and weak next to the next one in the feed. |
| True peak | ≤ −1 dBTP | Hot peaks crackle and distort once YouTube re-encodes your file. |
| Voice vs music | voice on top | Music burying the speech is the single most common amateur tell on YouTube. |
| Exposure + white balance | neutral, not clipped | Dark or green footage looks unfinished, like a raw clip nobody graded. |
| Focus + stabilisation | sharp, steady | Soft or shaky footage reads as a mistake, not a style. |
| Pacing · shot length | fits the genre | Too slow and the scroll wins; too frantic and the viewer gets tired. |
| First 3 seconds | one reason to stay | Most of your early drop-off happens right here, before second three. |
| Captions + safe zones | readable, in-frame | A large share of viewers watch on mute, so the text is the video. |
Eight checks on every upload adds up fast. CutScore runs all of them in one pass and hands back the fixes, so you spend the time editing instead of inspecting.
Five passes, in order.
1. Sound first: the part YouTube viewers judge instantly
I check audio before anything else, because people forgive a soft shot and they do not forgive bad sound. Two numbers carry most of the weight. Loudness, which you want near −14 LUFS for YouTube so your video does not feel timid next to the one that autoplays after it, and true peak, which you keep at or below −1 dBTP so nothing crackles once YouTube squashes your file. Then listen on the worst speakers you own. If you can still hear every word over the music, you are fine. If the music is winning, pull it down four or five decibels and stop being precious about it.
2. Picture: is it actually exposed, neutral and sharp?
Drop your screen brightness to something normal, not the heroic level you edit at. Look for shadows that have gone solid black with no detail, and highlights (a window, a white shirt) blown out to pure white. Then check that whites look white and not blue or orange. If skin looks like it belongs to a different species, your white balance drifted. This whole family of image checks, from exposure to colour to focus, is half of what we analyze, because it is the first thing a viewer reads before they have heard a word.
3. Edit: pace it for the viewer, not your patience
You have seen this edit so many times that it feels fast to you. It probably is not. The clearest single number for pace is average shot length: how long, on average, a shot holds before you cut. A tutorial can breathe; a fast vlog cannot. If a section drags, that is usually one shot held three seconds too long, repeated twenty times. A well-placed jump cut removes the dead air without you reshooting anything. The honest test: would you keep watching this if it were not yours?
4. The hook and the captions
Watch your first three seconds as if you were thumbing past it in the feed. Is there one clear reason to stay, or do you open with a slow logo and a throat-clear? On YouTube the opening seconds do most of the work for early retention, so if your strongest moment is at 0:40, a piece of it belongs at 0:01. Then read your captions on a phone at arm's length. If you squint, the font is too small or the contrast is too low. While you listen, count the filler words too. A few "ums" are human. A dozen a minute quietly tells people you are not sure of yourself.
5. Export: the boring step that undoes good work
This is the one nobody screenshots and everybody regrets. Export at 1080p or 4K with a healthy bitrate, upload, and then watch the published version on YouTube itself, on your phone. YouTube re-compresses everything, and a file that looked crisp on your drive can arrive soft and blocky. If it looks worse after upload, your export settings are the suspect, not your camera. Check the YouTube version before you tell anyone the video is live.
Here is a real CutScore report for an everyday YouTube video: every check above, scored, with timestamps and the exact fixes.
If you only check three things.
Most of the perceived jump from "homemade" to "this person knows what they are doing" comes from these three. Check them first.
By eye, by meter, or in one pass.
By eye and ear
Free, and better than nothing. The catch is the one I opened with: your senses adapt, and your gear flatters. Works best on someone else's video, or on yours after a day away from it. Use the checklist above so you are testing against targets, not vibes.
With scopes and meters
Accurate and honest. A loudness meter, a waveform, a scope for exposure. The cost is time and knowledge: you have to know the targets, open three tools, and read them correctly for every upload. Great if you enjoy this. Most people do not.
With a coach in one pass
Hand the file (or a link) to CutScore. It measures all eight and then some, against the right standard for your genre, and gives you a 0 to 100 score with timestamped evidence and the fixes. No scopes to read. See a sample report.
Frequently asked.
Check it before you upload.
CutScore runs this whole pre-upload checklist for you and tells you exactly what to fix, with the evidence to back it up. Join the waitlist for early access.
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