UKC

Once I've captured my video masterpieces on my various bits of kit from a smart-phone to a camcorder what is the best bitrate and FPS to render/create my prize winning videos?

I am especially interested in people's views of bit-rates and fps for 4K videos because I am knocking out some huge files for short videos. My most recent work of art is six minutes and fifty four seconds long and comes in at a whopping 1.66Gb. The bit-rate is 34,495kbps. is that too much?

I downloaded an excellent copy of The Force Awakens with good visuals and audio. That was a feature length film and well over 2 hours long which came in at 1.15Gb. The bitrate and fps were lower but the image on my monitor looked stunning.

Is there a sweet-spot for bitrates that I should aim for because I don't want to reduce a file size only to discover years down the line that I've pixellated my masterpieces to buggery?

In reply to The Lemming:


Never reduce the quality or filesize of the original footage.
Only reduce the bitrate / quality at the rendering stage.
In 5 years when Hollywood comes asking for footage of your dog chasing a stick then render again at a higher quality.

In reply to interdit:

Just like with my photography, I don't want to keep everything because otherwise my raw footage would be server farm size. I am hoping to edit out the crap and boring parts and go straight to finished product.

I don't possess a 4k TV, and it could be many many years before I get one.

My first digital camera shot fab videos. Back then it looked great on my small 13inch monitor. Today the small QuickTime files of 320 by 240 pixels, a bitrate of 2532kbps and 15 fps are woefully prepared for today's monitors and HD TVs.

I'm hoping to future proof my footage for when I get a new telly 5-10 years from now.

In reply to The Lemming:

I'm not going down the 4k video route as I sadly don't have 4k eyes!

In reply to The Lemming:


Ok. So you don't want to store hours of 4k cutting room floor stuff.

1. Render at whatever quality you feel your YT audience will benefit from today.
2. Also render the finished film at the highest quality , resolution and bitrate you can. This is a master cut film. Store this for the future. You will be able to republish at various resolutions and rates by transcoding, but will not have much leeway in the edit if you have binned all the original footage.

To use your analogy 'Just like with my photography, I don't want to keep everything because otherwise my raw footage would be server farm size'
This would be sort of like creating large tiffs or possibly hi-res, low compression jpgs from your raws, then binning the raws. You still have great options for creating smaller files in the future, but if you binned any of the raws without creating a tiff or hq jpg then you can never include it in the future 'directors cut'

In reply to interdit:



That sounds like the best option for a punter such as myself.

One last question. My camcorder captures images at 100Mbps, and at the moment my software of choice offers to render at 100Mbps as the recommended setting however it will allow me to up the render quality to 200Mbps.

Is there any mileage in rendering at 200Mbps or is this a fool's errand as the software will only be calculating stuff that does not physically exist to begin with?

Would rendering at 200Mbps have an adverse effect on the finished product and reduce the quality of the final rendered videos when I should have stuck with the 100Mbps footage as shot?

Also does fps matter 25, 30, 60, 120 when I don't want to invoke the slow motion feature?

In reply to The Lemming:

100mbs is fine.

Does fps matter??? Are you serious?

If you want something that leans towards filmic then go for 24/25fps if you want a more video look then go for 50/60fps.

To compare your efforts with that of 'The Force Awakens' is like wondering my Lewis Hamilton can lap Silverstone in his F1 car faster than you can in your Ford Escort.

In reply to The Lemming:

I assume what you're talking about is about compression and codecs? The reason your downloaded film is only 1.15Gb is because it's been rendered using a highly compressed codec (probably DivX or something) so the resulting file size is a lot smaller, where as your video will be exported with basically no compression.

It's a bit like taking a still image and saving it out as a bitmap and also saving it as a Jpeg, the files will be pretty much identical to the eye but the uncompressed bitmap image will be significantly larger in file size.

Its because of how it saves the data, in a bitmap it literally pixel 0,1 is X colour, pixel 0,2 is Y colour and so on. Where as a compressed format will say " okay this bunch of pixels are X colour, all these pixels are Y colour and so on, basically meaning it takes less data to store all the information used to make the image. Further compression will start causing degradation in quality by reducing the colours and blurring things together so it uses even less data to describe. (obviously its all a bit more complex than that but you get the idea)

There should be something under format options or something which will allow you to pick the codec you wish to use to encode the video file with, this combined with the resolution and frame rates will dictate your final file size.

In reply to Indy:


Daft question but can you tell the difference between 25fps and 50/60fps?

I thought that once you went to 24 then the eye would not notice any difference by adding any more.

In reply to The Lemming:


Yes, its very very noticeable.

Have you seen Peter Jackson's The Hobbit? it was done in 48fps rather than the standard 24fps and it looks weird. A number of films have recently been released in 60fps which again to my eyes doesn't look right.