Codecs and Formats for Editing YouTube Footage

What does YouTube actually serve?

As of September 2026, YouTube streams video in three long-GOP delivery codecs, H.264, VP9 and AV1, with audio in Opus or AAC. The codec a download gets depends on the video and the resolution, not on a setting you choose.

Each layer of a YouTube download has a better choice for the timeline:

Layer	What YouTube streams	What edits best
Video codec	H.264, VP9 or AV1, long-GOP	ProRes or DNxHR, intraframe
Audio	Opus or AAC, lossy	WAV, or PCM inside the .mov
Subtitles	Captions in the player	An SRT file next to the video

B-ROLL has no codec setting, so its MP4, MKV and WEBM files keep whatever YouTube streamed, often VP9 or AV1 with Opus audio. YouTube codecs: H.264 vs VP9 vs AV1 maps each codec to editing behavior, and what bitrate YouTube streams shows how much detail a download really holds.

Why do some formats edit better than others?

Intraframe codecs such as ProRes and DNxHR edit better because every frame is stored whole. Long-GOP codecs keep full frames only at intervals and rebuild the rest from differences, so scrubbing forces the editing app to decode many frames to show one.

Ema Zamboni ran into exactly that: 4K60 AV1 footage from YouTube was heavy to play back in DaVinci Resolve, and AV1 or VP9 downloads crashed Resolve at times. B-ROLL’s automatic conversion was built to solve that. Why H.264 and AV1 are hard to edit explains the mechanism, and proxies vs transcoding for YouTube footage weighs the two workarounds. The same keyframe structure decides how a clip starts: see keyframe cut vs frame-exact cut.

ProRes or DNxHR: how do you choose?

Choose ProRes or DNxHR by editing app and system: DNxHR suits Avid Media Composer and is a safe default for DaVinci Resolve on Windows, while ProRes suits Final Cut Pro and Mac-centered teams. Each video question has its own page:

Your question	Start with
Which format should I download?	Best format to download YouTube videos for editing
ProRes or DNxHR for my editing app?	ProRes vs DNxHR for editing
Which ProRes tier?	ProRes Proxy vs LT vs 422 vs HQ
Which DNxHR tier?	DNxHR LB vs SQ vs HQ vs HQX
How much disk space?	ProRes and DNxHR file size per minute
MOV, MP4, MKV or WEBM?	MOV vs MP4 vs MKV vs WEBM for video editing

B-ROLL downloads the video, then converts it to the lightest tier that still preserves the source, keeping resolution and frame rate. The conversion takes time and the whole CPU; see download YouTube videos in ProRes or DNxHR and the other B-ROLL features for video editors.

Does bit depth matter for YouTube footage?

Bit depth matters less than editors expect: converting an 8-bit YouTube stream to a 10-bit codec cannot add color depth the stream never had.

B-ROLL’s ProRes is always 10-bit 4:2:2, while its DNxHR uses 8-bit tiers and switches to HQX only for 10-bit sources. For HDR videos, yt-dlp prefers the HDR stream by default and B-ROLL applies no tone mapping. The details are in 8-bit vs 10-bit YouTube footage for editing.

Which audio format belongs on a timeline?

WAV is the safest audio format on a timeline, because every editing app imports it and it needs no decoding. YouTube audio is already lossy Opus or AAC, so WAV adds no quality, and a 320 kbps MP3 is a re-encode, not an upgrade.

B-ROLL saves audio as MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC or OPUS; inside its ProRes and DNxHR files the audio is uncompressed 16-bit PCM. Read YouTube audio quality: Opus, AAC and bitrates, MP3 vs WAV vs FLAC for video editing and the sample rate for video editing.

Which subtitle file should you keep?

SRT is the subtitle file to keep for editing: a plain sidecar file that DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro import. VTT is the web format with basic styling, and ASS carries rich styling that few editing apps read.

B-ROLL saves SRT, ASS or VTT next to the video, or embeds them (not in WEBM files or titles with square brackets). SRT vs VTT vs ASS compares the three, and the guides from download to timeline put each choice into a workflow.