What is Video Bitrate? - Video Bitrate Explained

When creating video content, you should pay attention to its quality. This is why you should know how many kilobits per second you should render your videos with. Knowing this will help you optimize both the quality and render times.

What is Video Bitrate?

Bitrate tells you how much data per second is encoded in the video. The bitrate of a video is often expressed in kilobits per second.

The higher the bitrate, the better the quality of the video but as the quality of the video increases so does its file size.

The bitrate of a video can be changed to be smaller before rendering, which reduces the file size of the final video.

Here is an example of three videos with the same content, resolution and frame rate encoded at different bitrates, making them different in both quality and file size.

You can see what bitrates YouTube recommends for a video, depending on its frame rate and resolution.

You should know that a video with a high resolution or frame rate requires a higher bitrate because there is more information to encode. It’s also important to understand which are the right settings for rendering a video so that the final video is optimal in size and quality.

Learn the basics of video editing with our course

Learn to make your own videos with DaVinci Resolve. In addition to the basics of video editing we'll teach you video tracking, color correction, animation and effect creation, voice-over recording, and how to adjust music and sounds to fit a video.

Enroll Now