From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Understanding Video Compression

What is bitrate? - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Understanding Video Compression

Start my 1-month free trial

What is bitrate?

“

- Bitrate is how many bits per second are transmitted through the network. It is a unit of speed and file weight. It's like miles per hour, or gallons per second. One byte is made up by eight bits, so if the data rate of a file is eight megabits per second, then it's the same as one megabyte per second. In this screenshot from Youtube's help, we can see that at the time of this recording, for 4K, 30 frames per second, they use 25-45 megabits per second. For 2K, they use 16 megabits per second, and for 1080, eight megabits, and so forth. So, what bitrate should you use? Well, it really depends on how you are delivering and the content of your video. You could be delivering for display in a kiosk or for the internet. Also, there are videos that have very little detail in them that will look good at a lower bitrate, and some with lots of texture and colors that will benefit from a much higher bitrate. We are really talking about the data transmission speed of our file, but that's not the only thing that we need to consider. A newer codec will look considerably better than an old one, even at the same bitrate. Another thing to consider is frame rate. Does your video have a lot of movement? Then you might benefit from a frame rate of 30 frames per second or higher. Does the subject in your video hardly move? Then you won't lose too much by reducing the frame rate, and therefore have less frames to transmit in the same bitrate, and the quality of each individual frame goes up. There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a bitrate for your video, but always ask yourself the following: How am I distributing the video? How is the viewer going to view the video? And what is the content of the video? This will help you determine what the best bitrate is for exporting your work.

Contents