How to render videos for the best quality and size

To achieve high quality and keep the file size to a minimum, please use the following output settings:

Video bitrate recommendations based on video quality:

Please note! You should not try to adjust the bitrate up. If the video has a bitrate of 10, its quality will not improve if you switch it to 20.

If you are shooting with your phone, always shoot horizontally! Shooting vertical leaves ugly black lines on the sides of your video that look awful.

If you’ve shot in 1440x1080, do not convert it to 1920x1080 by adding black borders on its sides. There is a way to adjust the video by cutting down just a few pixels on top and bottom without actually stretching it. But yes 16:9 aspect ratio would be the best for the future processing of the videos. As a rule, you want to choose “Square Pixel” and “Lock Aspect Ratio” to 16:9, like this:

Frames per second settings based on video size:

The frame rate recommendations also depend on the video standard - for PAL (more widespread in Europe) it’s 25 and for NTSC it's 24 or 29.

You probably don’t want to change your frame rate/frequency at all as a matter of fact. It doesn’t significantly influence the size of the file and tinkering with it may mess up the video, but these should be your minimum target settings for your video at the time of the shooting.

Changing the video quality up, provided the source of the video is in lower quality, will only make the video even worse, so as a rule of thumb never try to upgrade the quality of the video higher than what its raw file had been (e.g., there is no need to choose 20 Mbit bitrate when the source is 10 Mbit).