You should read this.

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/premiere-pro-adjusting-mpeg-encoding.html

I still don’t quite get it

Hi,

one slider is the picture quality by default the value = 9 the maximum is 15. The other slider is the bitrate normally this is 8000 about 50% the original value of the movie. Naturally more the bitrate value is high more the movie size is high more the movie quality is high.

Regards,

YR

The quality you wish to produce comes down to how it is viewed and the quality of the original file itself.

You can not improve on the quality of the original file no matter what you do.

There is no point in additing additional bit depth or rate beyond that of the original recording.

Anything below that is compression of one form or another. How much compression can be achieved before you notice a difference will depent on.

The codec in use and whether if it's a new codec, it can be played back by older equipment if not viewed on the machine that recorded it.

The size of the pixels and the type and size of display used.

Your proximity to the display.

And probably a lot of other things I've forgotten to mention.

You have sliders to control the output for a few reasons. Most of which are concerned with reducing the quality or size of the output of the file.

So the first job is to find out the quality of your file. What bit rate and frame rate did you record at? This can either be done by looking in your camera's manual or by using a free program like MediaInfo to check the files atributes. It will look something like this.

General
Complete name                            : V:\2018\Storm videos\RSF_9418.MOV
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : QuickTime
Codec ID                                 : qt   2007.09 (qt  /niko)
File size                                : 1.04 GiB
Duration                                 : 3 min 26 s
Overall bit rate                         : 43.3 Mb/s
Encoded date                             : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Tagged date                              : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
NCDT                                     : NCTG

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L4.2
Format settings                          : CABAC / 2 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, RefFrames               : 2 frames
Format settings, GOP                     : M=3, N=30
Codec ID                                 : avc1
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Video Coding
Duration                                 : 3 min 26 s
Bit rate                                 : 41.8 Mb/s
Width                                    : 1 920 pixels
Height                                   : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 59.940 (60000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.336
Stream size                              : 1.00 GiB (96%)
Language                                 : English
Encoded date                             : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Tagged date                              : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Color range                              : Full
Color primaries                          : BT.709
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.709
colour_primaries_Original                : BT.709
transfer_characteristics_Original        : BT.470 System M
matrix_coefficients_Original             : BT.709
Codec configuration box                  : avcC

Audio
ID                                       : 2
Format                                   : PCM
Format settings                          : Little / Signed
Codec ID                                 : sowt
Duration                                 : 3 min 26 s
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 1 536 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Channel layout                           : L R
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Bit depth                                : 16 bits
Stream size                              : 37.8 MiB (4%)
Language                                 : English
Encoded date                             : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Tagged date                              : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45

Now the part you are mainly interested in is the line.

Overall bit rate                         : 43.3 Mb/s

There is no point in going over this amount with the bit rate slider. It will just make your file size larger than it should be without adding any quality to the end result. The quality slider then could be slid all the way up to ensure there is no additional degredation to the output of the file although you may not notice a lot of difference if it is lower. It depends on your viewing conditions.

You may have noticed that in MEP there are a lot of presets. Most of those will work quite well if left alone and you match the quality of the preset roughly to your files original output. Most of the options are there to reduce file size and quality if you intend to upload the video somewhere that possibly doesn't support the file size you have used or can't display the file correctly due to limitations of the product showing the file. For instance if uploading to a web site there may be file size restrictions of both quality and overal file size. Both physical size and perhaps a time limit.

Some codecs can reduce a file size considerably without loss of quality but may be restricted in practical use due to the limited amount of equipment that can play them. Older codecs may take up more physical space but be played more universally. A file uploaded to a website often doesn't look as good as the one you have on your computer. That can't be helped as it will be recoded on upload to fit the site's requirements

Whatever you decide to do remember the main thing is whatever is done today will probably look terible in ten years time. Fifteen to twenty if you are using pro gear. If you want to slightly future proof your videos start using 4k as soon as possible. 6k is already here for the consumer. 8k is already there for professionals. Judging by the rate of advancement I would think most homes in the better of parts of the world will have at least 4k viewing as standard within the next four to five years.

The main thing for me at least is keeping the original files. That way, if or when improvements come along I can always re-edit if need be. While I've said you can't really improve the quality of a video, that is now. Who knows what is around the corner?

As for the quality slider?

That is mainly concerend with motion within the frame and perhaps a few other related points but the easiest way to see the result is to produce two files at the same bit rate but using the other slider at minimum and maximum to see the difference.

I thought when I started out, that photo editing was hard, but it is nothing compaired to video editing. Both are similar though. The more you do, the more you should get better at it. Also content is way more important than quality. People get hung up on quality. If the content is dull then nothing will save it.

Personally I would start out using the presets as they are. Then see if you can see a difference.

The quality you wish to produce comes down to how it is viewed and the quality of the original file itself.

You can not improve on the quality of the original file no matter what you do.

There is no point in additing additional bit depth or rate beyond that of the original recording.

Anything below that is compression of one form or another. How much compression can be achieved before you notice a difference will depent on.

The codec in use and whether if it's a new codec, it can be played back by older equipment if not viewed on the machine that recorded it.

The size of the pixels and the type and size of display used.

Your proximity to the display.

And probably a lot of other things I've forgotten to mention.

You have sliders to control the output for a few reasons. Most of which are concerned with reducing the quality or size of the output of the file.

So the first job is to find out the quality of your file. What bit rate and frame rate did you record at? This can either be done by looking in your camera's manual or by using a free program like MediaInfo to check the files atributes. It will look something like this.

General
Complete name                            : V:\2018\Storm videos\RSF_9418.MOV
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : QuickTime
Codec ID                                 : qt   2007.09 (qt  /niko)
File size                                : 1.04 GiB
Duration                                 : 3 min 26 s
Overall bit rate                         : 43.3 Mb/s
Encoded date                             : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Tagged date                              : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
NCDT                                     : NCTG

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L4.2
Format settings                          : CABAC / 2 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, RefFrames               : 2 frames
Format settings, GOP                     : M=3, N=30
Codec ID                                 : avc1
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Video Coding
Duration                                 : 3 min 26 s
Bit rate                                 : 41.8 Mb/s
Width                                    : 1 920 pixels
Height                                   : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 59.940 (60000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.336
Stream size                              : 1.00 GiB (96%)
Language                                 : English
Encoded date                             : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Tagged date                              : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Color range                              : Full
Color primaries                          : BT.709
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.709
colour_primaries_Original                : BT.709
transfer_characteristics_Original        : BT.470 System M
matrix_coefficients_Original             : BT.709
Codec configuration box                  : avcC

Audio
ID                                       : 2
Format                                   : PCM
Format settings                          : Little / Signed
Codec ID                                 : sowt
Duration                                 : 3 min 26 s
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 1 536 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Channel layout                           : L R
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Bit depth                                : 16 bits
Stream size                              : 37.8 MiB (4%)
Language                                 : English
Encoded date                             : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45
Tagged date                              : UTC 2018-05-26 23:41:45

Now the part you are mainly interested in is the line.

Overall bit rate                         : 43.3 Mb/s

There is no point in going over this amount with the bit rate slider. It will just make your file size larger than it should be without adding any quality to the end result. The quality slider then could be slid all the way up to ensure there is no additional degredation to the output of the file although you may not notice a lot of difference if it is lower. It depends on your viewing conditions.

You may have noticed that in MEP there are a lot of presets. Most of those will work quite well if left alone and you match the quality of the preset roughly to your files original output. Most of the options are there to reduce file size and quality if you intend to upload the video somewhere that possibly doesn't support the file size you have used or can't display the file correctly due to limitations of the product showing the file. For instance if uploading to a web site there may be file size restrictions of both quality and overal file size. Both physical size and perhaps a time limit.

Some codecs can reduce a file size considerably without loss of quality but may be restricted in practical use due to the limited amount of equipment that can play them. Older codecs may take up more physical space but be played more universally. A file uploaded to a website often doesn't look as good as the one you have on your computer. That can't be helped as it will be recoded on upload to fit the site's requirements

Whatever you decide to do remember the main thing is whatever is done today will probably look terible in ten years time. Fifteen to twenty if you are using pro gear. If you want to slightly future proof your videos start using 4k as soon as possible. 6k is already here for the consumer. 8k is already there for professionals. Judging by the rate of advancement I would think most homes in the better of parts of the world will have at least 4k viewing as standard within the next four to five years.

The main thing for me at least is keeping the original files. That way, if or when improvements come along I can always re-edit if need be. While I've said you can't really improve the quality of a video, that is now. Who knows what is around the corner?

As for the quality slider?

That is mainly concerend with motion within the frame and perhaps a few other related points but the easiest way to see the result is to produce two files at the same bit rate but using the other slider at minimum and maximum to see the difference.

I thought when I started out, that photo editing was hard, but it is nothing compaired to video editing. Both are similar though. The more you do, the more you should get better at it. Also content is way more important than quality. People get hung up on quality. If the content is dull then nothing will save it.

Personally I would start out using the presets as they are. Then see if you can see a difference.

Hi, thanks so much for that highly detailed response! You’ve helped me to understand it a lot more. So, basically, I should check the overall bitrate of the original video file and then match that to the video bitrate in the export settings in MEP? Plus I should keep the quality slider turned up to maximum all the time?

The presets in MEP have all pretty much been optimized by Magix for the export format and resolution. I don't play with these.

John CB

Hi Jak.

Pretty much, but because we don't see individual frames with our eyes, some blur in the individual frames around a moving subject within a video can actually give a more natural looking effect that trying to make it look sharper or have less blur around the edge of a moving limb for instance. The reason film is either 24 or 25 frames per second is that is the average, normal speed our brains can interpret movement between frame counts. At a pinch, with some some practice we may even be able to take in frame rates up into the 60fps rate. Birds eyes, on the other hand, can see nearer 75fps, which is why a bird in the road may seem to leave it to the last moment before it gets out of the way of an approaching car. So to the bird, we seem to move in slow motion.

Different codecs will produce different file sizes and may look as good or better for a given file size. Some codecs may make a video look to your eye, more pleasing. I think there is room for artistic interpretation as to what looks better to an individual. There is no accounting for taste as they say :-).

Sometimes people over sharpen their images during recording when sometimes an editing program which should have more processing power and with possibly better effects, may do better. The same for goes for colour saturation. Really, when recording video you need to record a fairly flat looking video with good tonal range (light to dark) which can then be made to look more as you would like it to in post-processing. Increasing colour saturation in the recording could for instance make some areas lose finer detail. Over-sharpening some subject matter can make the video have a painted look. Just as in general photography, care should be made in the choices you make when recording depending on how configurable your recording machine is. That is why some of the newer mirrorless and DSLR camera bodies allow a seperate 10 bit log output to an extenal recorder. People sometimes record at 60fps thinking it will give more detail but actually makes some movement look un-natural.

60fps has it's place for other reasons but not necessarily ones of quality. The exposure time per frame there is more important especially when recording in poor light as it will help keep ISO values down. That in turn will give each frame greater detail with less noise and possibly less in-camera noise reduction to be apllied which in turn would soften the image and make it look less detailed in things like cloth and hair for instance.

At the end of the day there is a lot that can be done with care to get better detail, with the gear you use, but less can be done once the original file is made. You can only hope to preserve what you have recorded and have enough leeway within the file to alter to taste without losing too much detail. Some camcorders and cameras will not alow you to make ISO adjustments or aperture or frame exposure time adjustments or will alter one parameter when you alter another to try to keep the exposure within a given parameter. Most people though could not cope without a certain amount of automation. Unfortunately the more Pro the gear is, the more leeway there is to make a bad recording without understanding what affects the quality of the output.

Sometimes I do play with the sliders and settings in editing but only when I need to make the file size smaller for uploading or to make it compatible with an older bit of equipment.

Hence a lot of information can go missing when say, trying to make a DVD. Cameras at the higher end have been able to outdo the DVD spec for a few years now. That is not so say a good looking DVD can't be produced but you would probably be better off looking at the original file if the file was of a better quality than the DVD specification.

MEP is a big program with a lot of adjustments to try to help those who need the flexibility. Luckily for most of the rest of us there are ample presets that work just great for those less adventurous.

But that's half the fun for me. Finding out what is possible. And the best way to do that is experiment until I get an idea of what the limits of the program are. At the moment, the program is winning :-).

Hi Jak.

Pretty much, but because we don't see individual frames with our eyes, some blur in the individual frames around a moving subject within a video can actually give a more natural looking effect that trying to make it look sharper or have less blur around the edge of a moving limb for instance. The reason film is either 24 or 25 frames per second is that is the average, normal speed our brains can interpret movement between frame counts. At a pinch, with some some practice we may even be able to take in frame rates up into the 60fps rate. Birds eyes, on the other hand, can see nearer 75fps, which is why a bird in the road may seem to leave it to the last moment before it gets out of the way of an approaching car. So to the bird, we seem to move in slow motion.

Different codecs will produce different file sizes and may look as good or better for a given file size. Some codecs may make a video look to your eye, more pleasing. I think there is room for artistic interpretation as to what looks better to an individual. There is no accounting for taste as they say :-).

Sometimes people over sharpen their images during recording when sometimes an editing program which should have more processing power and with possibly better effects, may do better. The same for goes for colour saturation. Really, when recording video you need to record a fairly flat looking video with good tonal range (light to dark) which can then be made to look more as you would like it to in post-processing. Increasing colour saturation in the recording could for instance make some areas lose finer detail. Over-sharpening some subject matter can make the video have a painted look. Just as in general photography, care should be made in the choices you make when recording depending on how configurable your recording machine is. That is why some of the newer mirrorless and DSLR camera bodies allow a seperate 10 bit log output to an extenal recorder. People sometimes record at 60fps thinking it will give more detail but actually makes some movement look un-natural.

60fps has it's place for other reasons but not necessarily ones of quality. The exposure time per frame there is more important especially when recording in poor light as it will help keep ISO values down. That in turn will give each frame greater detail with less noise and possibly less in-camera noise reduction to be apllied which in turn would soften the image and make it look less detailed in things like cloth and hair for instance.

At the end of the day there is a lot that can be done with care to get better detail, with the gear you use, but less can be done once the original file is made. You can only hope to preserve what you have recorded and have enough leeway within the file to alter to taste without losing too much detail. Some camcorders and cameras will not alow you to make ISO adjustments or aperture or frame exposure time adjustments or will alter one parameter when you alter another to try to keep the exposure within a given parameter. Most people though could not cope without a certain amount of automation. Unfortunately the more Pro the gear is, the more leeway there is to make a bad recording without understanding what affects the quality of the output.

Sometimes I do play with the sliders and settings in editing but only when I need to make the file size smaller for uploading or to make it compatible with an older bit of equipment.

Hence a lot of information can go missing when say, trying to make a DVD. Cameras at the higher end have been able to outdo the DVD spec for a few years now. That is not so say a good looking DVD can't be produced but you would probably be better off looking at the original file if the file was of a better quality than the DVD specification.

MEP is a big program with a lot of adjustments to try to help those who need the flexibility. Luckily for most of the rest of us there are ample presets that work just great for those less adventurous.

But that's half the fun for me. Finding out what is possible. And the best way to do that is experiment until I get an idea of what the limits of the program are. At the moment, the program is winning :-).

So what happens in the case of each individual source file, direct from the camera, having a different bitrate? For instance, I have recently been putting together a video in MEP, using the raw video files direct from my camera. However, according to Mediainfo, each of those files have a different bitrate. Why is this? And if each file in the timeline contains a different bitrate then how do I know what to set the bitrate to in the encoder settings once I’ve finished editing and ready to export/burn to disc?

 

So what happens in the case of each individual source file, direct from the camera, having a different bitrate? For instance, I have recently been putting together a video in MEP, using the raw video files direct from my camera. However, according to Mediainfo, each of those files have a different bitrate. Why is this? And if each file in the timeline contains a different bitrate then how do I know what to set the bitrate to in the encoder settings once I’ve finished editing and ready to export/burn to disc?

As to your first question, I have no idea about your camera or how you use it but it's possible that different settings or light levels if fully automated could produce varience in the bitrate of the file if it has less detail in the scene to record. Dark and black areas or bleached blown out areas have next to no information in them to record and will be 'blocked' into areas of less information to record. Most consumer cameras do not record the direct output of the sensor as such but is already converted to a file format.

If there is a great difference between file bitrates then I would go with the highest bitrate for the highest resolution clip. However, if the files are a higher bitrate than the format needed to burn to a disc you will lose some resolution whatever you produce your file to as it is recoded for soemthing like a DVD. If on the other hand it's a straight file tranfer, providing it fits onto the disc and plays back on whatever you want it to play back on, then there is no problem.

 

So what happens in the case of each individual source file, direct from the camera, having a different bitrate? For instance, I have recently been putting together a video in MEP, using the raw video files direct from my camera. However, according to Mediainfo, each of those files have a different bitrate. Why is this? And if each file in the timeline contains a different bitrate then how do I know what to set the bitrate to in the encoder settings once I’ve finished editing and ready to export/burn to disc?

As to your first question, I have no idea about your camera or how you use it but it's possible that different settings or light levels if fully automated could produce varience in the bitrate of the file if it has less detail in the scene to record. Dark and black areas or bleached blown out areas have next to no information in them to record and will be 'blocked' into areas of less information to record. Most consumer cameras do not record the direct output of the sensor as such but is already converted to a file format.

If there is a great difference between file bitrates then I would go with the highest bitrate for the highest resolution clip. However, if the files are a higher bitrate than the format needed to burn to a disc you will lose some resolution whatever you produce your file to as it is recoded for soemthing like a DVD. If on the other hand it's a straight file tranfer, providing it fits onto the disc and plays back on whatever you want it to play back on, then there is no problem.

Could the difference in bitrate between files also be due to each file being different in length? Because each of my individual video files aren’t all the same length, they’re different.

Also, do some video cameras allow you to actually select the bitrate that you record in? On my Panasonic camcorder, where my files came from, it doesn’t have any option to let you adjust bitrate. Although I guess that could simply be because it’s not a pro camera...

@jak.willis, @CubeAce

. . . .each individual source file, direct from the camera, having a different bitrate? . . . .

Without knowing the camera make/model, I would suspect that if you look at the various files, those that have a higher bitrate have more action/movement in them or more detail.

This is by design eg a shot with little detail and very little movement will be more compressible giving a lower bitrate without losing quality, a panning shot will require a higher bitrate (lower compression) to maintain the quality as the scene is changing and more information requires to be stored.

HTH

John EB

@jak.willis, @johnebaker

Hi John, what you have described is the job for the quality slider, ie, the movement side of things in the compression used within the encoding algorithm. The bit rate compression happens from the sensor readings and involves matching blocks of adjacent pixels (or in this case photo-sites) on the sensor to see if they have the same, or very similar levels of light falling on them. If they do, then they can be given the same value and 'blocked together' as part of the code and reducing the amount of intruction needed to re-assemble the information within the frame. That becomes the bit rate and responsible for most of the final file size. This is why most cameras give a variable bit rate output. Some consumer cameras do allow you to use a constant bitrate as an option when recording and can, if the compression ratios within the camera are quite high, help in retaining a bit more information. But that is only a part of the reasons for varying bit rate output. Video cameras as well as digital cameras capable of recording video can have quite aggressive compression in other areas of making the final frame render. For instance, shooting in low light can have a lot of seperate detremental effects on quality of output and on top of that can produce much lower bitrate files. The image will also look a lot softer due to noise reduction being applied. The image could be sharpened again in post processing but that normally means the return of unwanted noise within the image and result in a higher bit rate which is in all probability just using up bandwidth showing you the noise rather than doing anything useful.

In in digital photography, most cameras now will give you a chioce of saving files as a jpg or a raw file. Sometimes a raw file is called a digital negative or DNG file depending on camera make. The jpg is the compressed version which is an actual picture file whereas the raw / dng file is a direct readout of the sensor but encoded in a non lossy format that retains the readout information of each photosite from the sensor. This is not a picture format that can be read directly on a computer screen but a set of instructions that will tell an apropriate editing program how to construct the picture. This is why the relevent raw codec from the manufacturer has to reside on a given computer to see an image of a raw file when viewed in say Windows based machine. It gets worse than that because each individual model of a camera normally has it's own individual codec related to the type of sensor it uses.

So, basically, on a recorded video, a MOV. / AVI. / WMV. / etc. are all lossy, compressed format versions of what the sensor is seeing. How compressed the file is comes down to the manufacturer and how they implement the codecs in their cameras. It's there and baked into the file. The only way to improve the quality is to take time and effort into trying to get decent exposures. Just as you would taking digital stills. Those cameras that allow adjustments often have tools to help such as 'Zebra striping' to show you where the parts of the image are over exposed. How you adjust and what you can adjust depends on what that camera allows you to do. In general it is the same as for digital photography with three basic options of control with an added complication of a fourth. An individual frame exposure consists of those four elements.

Frame rate: Which can impact on how long a time you can leave a frame open for exposure, so that in lower light a slower frame rate can help reduce the ISO value needed for better control of noise and sharper rendering, or the aperture for depth of view.

Shutter speed: The amount of time needed to get the best exposure depending on the light level available. As light levels fall, in order to keep the ISO values down as far as possible (to reduce noise and agressive noise reduction being applied within camera), the exposure has to be lengthened to compensate but the longer the exposure the more movement will be recorded. This is not always a bad thing and can actually make movement seem more normal but there are limits to exposure time associated with the frame rate. So at 60 fps you can only have half the exposure time available that you would have had using 30fps. This results in shorter exposures and can lead to problems in producing smooth motion of fast moving subjects.

Aperture: the physical size of the opening in the lens to the sensor. The larger it is, the more light can reach the sensor within a given time period. But, the larger the aperture is made the shallower your depth of field becomes and can make getting pin sharp focus difficult as a subject moves towards or away from the lens. Then it becomes a problem for the autofocus sytem to keep up with the movement. This can be overcome by 'stopping down' the aperture (making the hole physically smaller) which will give a deeper focus field but that will reduce the amount of light reaching the sensor which may result in needing to boost the ISO value needed or incressing the exposure time of the frame.

ISO value: Generally speaking the lower the ISO value the better for the quality of the output file will be in both lack of noise and base sharpening. The ISO is the amount of amplification given to the recording to ensure correct exposure of the frame. The Base ISO figure for a camera is normally the lowest figure given in the cameras specs but not always. This is where no real amplification is needed to ensure the light wells of the photosites can be fully charged if need be during the exposure time chosen.

In general, the more of these you can alter, the more control on how you want your output to look like will be, but the downside is if you don't know what you are doing or why, you can make a bigger mess of things than leaving the camera to do the decision making.

Earlier I talked about raw files for still images. The video equivalent is the Log file. Some cameras now allow a Log file to be captured by either the camera itself or more commonly by an additional externally attached recorder. These files take a direct readout from the sensor and record all the data available. Not all Log output is equal, and the same is true of raw files. Some raw output formats go as low as 8 bit and as high as 16 bit in overal bit depth of the image taken. That is a very large difference in the tonal range a camera can capture. In video too, the output bit depth for tonal range can vary, but so far, by not as much. In the semi Pro arena this is normally either 8 or 10 bit. Although that figure will have an effect on the overal bitrate of a files output it is not the same as the overal bit rate of the output of the file.

I don't know if this clears anything up for anyone or just makes it more confusing, but this is about as much as I'm willing to write about this topic for now before it turns into a book :-)

[Added note] although the bit depth of video may be less than high end stills cameras where they are still primarily designed to produce files for printing, video is purely a screen shown format and so far monitors and most projectors do not go above 10 bit at present.

This is a good discussion. I was wondering about some of these things myself and have learned something here. I am on the newest MEP and the "sliders" are no longer there. I can simply type in a value for target bitrate and the quality is now just a drop down box with about eight choices ranging from "best" to "fastest", which seems fairly obvious. There are some other parameters I see which are mentioned in the help file. GOP (Group of Pictures) length and structure isn't explained but I imagine that has to do with how the algorithm organizes consecutive "similar" frames for compression and I don't imagine I need to worry or mess with it.

@CubeAce

Hi

. . . . the more control on how you want your output to look like will be, but the downside is if you don't know what you are doing or why, you can make a bigger mess of things than leaving the camera to do the decision making. . . . .

I agree totally with the above comment and used to tell my students the same thing.

John EB