Rendering your videos for best quality and size
Many of you create and edit your own content, and I think that is awesome! I’ve taken some time to talk to our content team and get some useful information and a few recommendations on how to render the content for the best quality and size.
To achieve high quality and keep the file size to a minimum, please use the following output settings:
- Video Codec: H264
- Audio Codec: AAC (48kHz)
Video bitrate recommendations based on video quality:
- 4k – 50Mbit
- HD 1080 - 20Mbit
- HD 720 - 15Mbit
Please note! You should not try to adjust the bitrate up. If the video has a bitrate of 10, its quality will not improve if you switch it to 20.
If you are shooting with your phone, always shoot horizontal! Shooting vertical leaves ugly black lines on the sides of your video that look awful.
If you’ve shot in 1440x1080, do not convert it to 1920x1080 by adding black borders on its sides. There is a way to adjust the video by cutting down just a few pixels on top and bottom without actually stretching it. But yes 16:9 aspect ratio would be the best for future processing of the videos. As a rule, you want to choose “Square Pixel” and “Lock Aspect Ratio” to 16:9, like this: http://take.ms/XSSad
Frames per second settings based on video size:
- For HD 1080 and 720, use 30 fps.
- SD video sources should be 24-25 fps
The frame rate recommendations also depend on the video standard - for PAL (more widespread in Europe) it’s 25 and for NTSC it is 24 or 29.
You probably don’t want to change your frame rate/frequency at all as a matter of fact. It doesn’t significantly influence the size of the file and tinkering with it may mess up the video, but these should be your minimum target settings for your video at the time of the shooting.
Changing the video quality up, provided the source of the video is in lower quality, will only make the video even worse, so as a rule of thumb never try to upgrade the quality of the video higher than what its raw file had been.
You are welcome to ask questions and add your recommendations to this thread. I'm by no means a renown expert, only relaying what information I could pull out of our experienced content team. So if you've got more suggestions or better information please share!