Encoding; do some editors go overboard or not?

[tremault]

Encoding is generally a personal thing but it's worth talking about. I was asked recently about how I ensure my file sizes are reasonably small yet the quality is good, while some other editors have file sizes that are many multiples larger.
I personally believe that a bit rate of 4000 Kb per second is more than enough for a 1080p file. I believe that any more than that is entirely redundant. What are your views on this?

When I make my edits, I render out as DNxHD with PCM audio and then use handbrake to re-encode. I choose both HEVC and AVC and I use a bitrate of 4000 for AVC and 3151 for HEVC because it's more advanced. I use 256kb/s AAC for audio. I feel this is a excellent quality. Sometimes I even think that perhaps my bitrates are excessive!
I'd like to add the caveat that for movies with lots of granular detail like Pacific Rim, a higher bitrate may be necessary.

How do you guys finish your files and what is your philosophy regarding bitrates and file sizes?

 

[DigModiFicaTion]

I tend to follow what streaming sites use as their delivery as a guide. Depending on which service you download from, industry range/standard for 1080p seems to be between 6000kbps and 12000kbps for video and at least 320kbps AC3 audio files. Even at 6000kbps, you still have an inferior encoding vs a 1:1 bitrate with a source disc. For Blu Ray sources I tend to encode final renders at 10000kbps or 15000kbps for video and match or max aac 5.1 bitrate.

 

[futon88]

I honestly have no idea what I'm doing on this front, so I'll be watching this thread closely...

If I pull my bluray source into my NLE, and from there encode H.264 @ 6000kbps, then pass that through handbrake at 4000kbps, what do I get? Won't I lose more on each pass, or have things evolved so much that it's essentially lossless in some scenarios? Should be using a higher bitrate for the intermediary (ie. what comes from the NLE), or should I encode with something smaller from the NLE and skip handbrake entirely? So many questions.

 

[tremault]

I honestly have no idea what I'm doing on this front, so I'll be watching this thread closely...

If I pull my bluray source into my NLE, and from there encode H.264 @ 6000kbps, then pass that through handbrake at 4000kbps, what do I get? Won't I lose more on each pass, or have things evolved so much that it's essentially lossless in some scenarios? Should be using a higher bitrate for the intermediary (ie. what comes from the NLE), or should I encode with something smaller from the NLE and skip handbrake entirely? So many questions.

yeah you might end up losing something that way, for your initial export I'd try and keep it as lossless as possible. If you can export prores or dnxhd then do that, but if you're limited to H264 then whack the bitrate up to absolute maximum. Just to be safe
Also, I find that Handbrake just does a really good job whereas Resolve is pretty limited at encoding in h264 or h265. You get more options in handbrake and it seems more stable with these codecs.

 

[futon88]

My NLE can do:

• H.264 (250 kb/s to 80,000 kb/s)
• Lossless H.264
• Lossless MPEG-4
• Lossless FFv1
• Lossless HuffYUV
• Apple ProRes 422
• Apple ProRes 4444

 

[futon88]

Interesting...Just tried lossless H.264 on a 45 second clip. Took 15 minutes(!) but it's smaller than my 8000 kb/s version. It seems to have settled on 6000 kb/s. I'll play around with the other formats. Thanks for the pointer!

 

[Gieferg]

I personally believe that a bit rate of 4000 Kb per second is more than enough for a 1080p file.

For me it is nowhere close to enough.

All of my edits have final versions that are 25 Mbps or higher to fill up BD-25 (usually 21-23 GB) which I always burn on the disc.
Versions released are usually 8-12 GB, so the bitrate is lower. I've shared some full size versions of my edits but people usually didn't care so I stopped doing that. But for my personal needs it is always full blu-ray and it needs to be fully compatible with the standard, so no cropping black bars, ac3 audio (stereo or 5.1).

 

[tremault]

For me it is nowhere close to enough.

All of my edits have final versions that are 25 Mbps or higher to fill up BD-25 (usually 21-23 GB) which I always burn on the disc.
Versions released are usually 8-12 GB, so the bitrate is lower. I've shared some full size versions of my edits but people usually didn't care so I stopped doing that. But for my personal needs it is always full blu-ray and it needs to be fully compatible with the standard, so no cropping black bars, ac3 audio (stereo or 5.1).

Have you studied the image and compared lower vs high? I personally can't tell the difference between 4000 and 8000 on most things. It's possible my observation is not keen enough?

 

[Gieferg]

Have you studied the image and compared lower vs high?

Yes.

Blu-ray quality is the standard I am accustomed to, and I am quite often not too happy with what I see on streaming services or most of fanedits that I've seen.
A perfect example of fanedit done right in quality department Is M4 Hobbit which is available as 2xBD50.

 

[futon88]

Tried ProRes 4444 (Normal). Same 00:00:45 clip...2.2 GB. Won't be using that one...

 

[tremault]

Yes.

Blu-ray quality is the standard I am accustomed to, and I am quite often not too happy with what I see on streaming services or most of fanedits that I've seen.
A perfect example of fanedit done right in quality department Is M4 Hobbit which is available as 2xBD50.

I see, thanks for the extra perspective. My fanedits are mostly from digital bought versions that I buy on Amazon because I struggled to buy a bluray drive. So I'm holding myself back in a big way. That is an issue. I should make plans to improve my situation.

Tried ProRes 4444 (Normal). Same 00:00:45 clip...2.2 GB. Won't be using that one...

my masters come out hundreds of GB at least. Since I won't be keeping the master, It's okay. It just ensures there is a perfect image for encoding.

 

[futon88]

I'm gonna need a bigger boat hard drive.

 

[tremault]

I'm gonna need a bigger boat hard drive.

yeah, fan-editing can take a lot of space if you want quality.

 

[futon88]

And here I thought my 40 GB source file was "big".

 

[The Scribbling Man]

I work in lossless and control visual compression in handbrake after render, and audio compression in meGUI. I don't have a specific bitrate I lean on; I just use my eye. I render samples and get it looking as good as I can until I don't notice a difference and then go with that. The file size varies but approx: my edits range from 4:3 to widescreen, old to contemporary, 1-2 hours, and seem to sit in the range of 6-15gb most of the time.

Edit: I should also mention that I work with blu-ray sources (1080p).

 

[krausfadr]

There is NO standard bitrate to use as guideline for quality. H264 and H265 will require differing file sizes. That said, and to somewhat contradict what I just mentioned, in general 1GB per hour of 1080p video is a good starting point to ensure you are not going to be viewing pixelated subpar video. Also, the same video in 2160p needs at least 3 times the bitrate.

It should be noted bitrate alone is not the answer. NLE's suck at encoding to H264 and H265. Some videos, no matter how high you adjust the quality in the Non Linear Editor (NLE,) it will have major blockiness in dark scenes in smooth areas of the picture or the background. Resolve, Premiere, and FCPX are all guilty of this. They have not built a quality encoder like Handbrake has. I'd imagine Vegas is probably in the same boat as well. Best practice is to use the highest quality Prores you are willing to use or even better yet Cineform (Film 2) as the codec for exporting from the NLE.

A suitable bitrate is entirely dependent on the content. Highly complex scenes with a lot of film grain will need a lot of bitrate for high quality. Series shot without grain and lots of closeups of faces can have a much lower bitrate as the content is much less complex. So a 4K version of Blade Runner with all the grain will actually need to be 20-30GB. A 4K version of Shazam only needs about 5GB. When I did an edit of Hannibal from the 4K bluray, there was so much grain the file needed to be 30+ GB. So I went into my NLE and applied some grain reduction so that the final encode could be a reasonably small filesize.

The ideal approach is to use the quality (crf) settings in Handbrake where you set a quality level rather than a bitrate, crf of 22 for 2160p and a setting of 20 for 1080p will generally achieve good results. The lower the crf the higher the quality. So a crf of zero would be a huuuuuge filesize. And a crf of 40 would typically look bad. I found dark scenes taking oplace on Exegol (in the Rise of Skywalker) neded a much higher quality setting than the rest of the movie. If you were to apply the Exegol bitrate to the whole movie you'd have a huge filesize. So you can use zones in the command line to set a quality of crf 20 for the whole movie, but during exegol scenes it raises the crf quality to something like 13.

Setting an average bitrate for an encode is a mistake. Don't do it.

This has been a public service announcement from krausfadr, a guy who likes encoding way too much.

 

[DonkeyKonga]

There are diminishing returns when it comes to file size. I can easily tell 10 and 20 GB files apart. 40 and 50 GB files are harder to distinct from eachother. I think for fanedits anything between 5 to 30 GB is the sweetspot depending on the movie.

 

[tremault]

There are diminishing returns when it comes to file size. I can easily tell 10 and 20 GB files apart.

What if the 20gb file was encoded in OBS using nvenc and the 10gb was encoded in handbrake using 2 passes using cpu and using the slowest process?

 

[DonkeyKonga]

What if the 20gb file was encoded in OBS using nvenc and the 10gb was encoded in handbrake using 2 passes using cpu and using the slowest process?

Yeah there are exceptions to the rule obviously. That's why I said 5 to 30 GB is the sweetspot. It kinda depends on source file, render methods etc.

 

[tremault]

Yeah there are exceptions to the rule obviously. That's why I said 5 to 30 GB is the sweetspot. It kinda depends on source file, render methods etc.

I think this is something we also need to explore and I think it's important for newer editors to understand that if you do a fast encode, the video will look worse even at a high bitrate. encoding at 7000kb/s in OBS for streaming tends to look worse than a slow encoded video at 2000kb/s and also people need to know that nvenc is more error prone than cpu rendering. I'm always looking for more info myself so that's why I phrased it as a question. My gut feeling is that the 20gb file I posited would look worse than the 10GB. A few people have said they prefer higher bitrates and quality, but this does also leave the question of how long the encode was. I have a fairly decent cpu (a ryzen 7 2700) so it can encode relatively fast, and I choose the setting that takes a few hours to encode an average movie, and I like to think this gives me a good result.

there is also a question of actually sending the file. I tend to use free google drive accounts and the limit is 15gb. since I like to provide both h264 and h265 this gives me a ceiling of 7gb per file, but I never get anywhere near that anyway. other people's download speeds and storage is also a factor.