Bitrates

[G-Person]

Hello folks, I had read plenty all around about bitrates.

But most talking about social media like Facebook or YouTube.

I will like some information where or how to calculate the minimun bitrate

on Premeire Pro CC with out lossing any quality.

Not for social media or anything, just plain video good quality at minimun bitrate.

If anyone have a formula that I could use when exporting a video on Premiere Pro?
Or where, I could such information,  Thanks in advance.

[Richard van den Boogaard]

There is no correct answer possible, because encoding is entirely dependent on the amount of movement in the footage. If you have lots of things moving at the same time in the frame (e.g. a soccer match with an audience in the background, moving leafs or water waves) you will typically need a higher bitrate to show all these fast changing areas than when you have hardly any movement (e.g. a talking head on a still background).

The latter may look acceptable at 2Mbps, while the first may not have enough at 10Mbps.

[John T Smith]

What Richard said, to which I will add

Make your own 1-to-10 scale of the movement in YOUR video

Export some samples at different bitrates and make a table

1-at-2mps = good

5-at-2mps = bad

9-at-2mps = unwatchable

And so on to make your own table of your settings

[R Neil Haugen]

And of course, frame-size affects needed bitrate. So a UHD/3840x2160 will need higher bitrate for the same "feel" than a 1920x1080 export would.

Neil

[Steve Griffiths]

All great advice already posted. There's no formula - but as you encode more stuff you will start to get a sense for the datarates you require depending on the source video. 

If you are going for a 'good' quality minimum datarate for HD video - you will *usually* get 'good' results at around 6-7 Mbps  for H.264 encoded exports, particulary if the video does not have complex motion or moving high detail. If you want almost indistinguishable from the original then 10-15+ Mbps. You can also try H.265 - it will give the same quality but at lower datarates OR higher quality at same datarates as H.264. Though H.265 is not as 'universal' as H.264 for all playback platforms.

[Richard van den Boogaard]

Please also consider the following:

h.265 is a more efficient codec than h.264. For local playback, you will typically get better quality at lower bitrates.

However, if you're going to use your content for uploading to online/social media platforms, your clip WILL be re-encoded, no matter what. Just like making a copy of a photo that was previously printed out, quality will suffer. In such cases, it's better to upload a high bitrate version, so the re-encoding process won't do as much damage.

Also, these re-encoding engines are created to handle large quantities of videos at lightning speeds (given the amount of content that is added every minute). In both h.264/h.265 codecs you can choose single or dual pass encoding. Use the latter only for creating smaller versions for local playback. Dual pass encoded files require more CPU power during playback (decoding), but every frame is filled to maximum capacity (ie efficient encoding) and high movement frames use extra space or "bit reservoirs" inside previous frames.

Such efficiency is mostly disregarded by re-encoding engines, as it eats up processing power.

Hence, you'll want to deliver a "fat" or high bitrate version that is easy to re-encode to such destinations: single pass encoding or even constant bitrate at high(er) numbers.