Re-upload quality loss
Also known as: generation loss, recompression loss
The visible damage from publishing a video that was already downloaded from another platform, since each pass compresses what the last pass left.
Updated
What it means
Every platform re-encodes what it receives. A file uploaded once has already been through Platform recompression, and a copy downloaded from there and uploaded again goes through the same process a second time.
The damage compounds rather than repeating. The second encoder is compressing artefacts as though they were detail, which spends data describing the damage instead of the picture underneath it.
Action footage suffers worst of all. Water, snow, foliage and Motion blur are exactly what compression struggles with, so two passes turn a detailed clip into something visibly soft and blocky on any large screen.
How it works in practice
Uploading the original to each platform avoids the whole problem. The same master file sent to three destinations is three single passes rather than one pass and two copies of a copy.
Keeping the finished export is the habit that matters. A result saved locally can be posted anywhere later, where a video that only exists on a platform has to be downloaded again before it can go anywhere.
Where a download is unavoidable, the highest version available is worth finding. A 1080p copy survives a second pass better than a reduced one, which is a Video quality decision rather than a convenience.
What to watch out for
The badge is the smaller problem. A Watermark on repost is visible and annoying, where the compression damage is what actually makes the video look amateurish on a large screen.
It is invisible on the device people check on. A phone screen hides the damage that a television reveals immediately, so the decision gets made on entirely the wrong display.
Screen recording is worse than downloading. A capture of a playing video adds a frame rate mismatch and a scaling pass on top of the recompression, which is three generations rather than two.
How RawClip handles it
The delivered file is the master to publish everywhere, which keeps every destination down to a single compression pass each. Downloading a result from one platform in order to post it on another is the one step worth avoiding entirely.