Video Bitrate & File Size Calculator

In short Bitrate is the number that decides whether a video looks clean or blocky, and the required figure depends on four things: resolution, frame rate, codec and how much motion the footage contains. Motion matters far more than people expect, because video compression works by describing what CHANGED between frames — a static talking head at 1080p can look excellent at a bitrate that would fall apart completely on football or a handheld walk through a forest, where almost every pixel changes every frame. That is why one recommended figure for a resolution is always wrong for someone. Codec generation is the other large term: H.265 and VP9 need roughly half the bitrate of H.264 for similar quality, and AV1 improves on those again, though the gains depend heavily on how much time the encoder is given. Uploading above a platform's recommendation is still usually worthwhile, because the platform re-encodes everything anyway and a cleaner source produces a cleaner result. These are estimates from bits-per-pixel guidance rather than measurements — a two-pass or CRF encode adapts to the actual footage and will beat any fixed figure, so use this to size a file and let the encoder decide the rest.