What Are Video Resolution and Bitrate? A Simple Guide

When you upload or save a video, you will see numbers such as 1080p, 4K, 30 fps and 8 Mbps. They describe how sharp the video looks and how large the file will be. Once you understand them, it becomes much easier to choose good export settings and to fix videos that look blurry. Resolution: how many pixels Resolution is the number of pixels in each frame. A 1080p video is 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall. A 720p video is 1280 by 720, and 4K is roughly 3840 by 2160. More pixels can show more detail, but only if the original recording had that detail. For vertical videos, such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, the frame is turned on its side. The most common size is 1080 by 1920 pixels. Frame rate: how smooth the motion looks Frame rate, written as fps, is how many pictures are shown each second. 24 fps gives a film look, 30 fps is common for social media, and 60 fps looks very smooth for fast action such as sports or gaming. Bitrate: how much data per second Bitrate is the amount of data used for every second of video, usually measured in megabits per second (Mbps). It has a large effect on quality. Two videos can both be 1080p, but the one with a higher bitrate usually looks cleaner because it keeps more detail and has fewer blocky areas. Bitrate also controls file size. A video with a higher bitrate is larger, and a longer video is larger too. As a rough idea, a one-minute clip at 8 Mbps is about 60 megabytes. Why do platforms make my video look worse? Social platforms compress every upload so videos load quickly for everyone. They re-encode your file at their own settings, which can soften details. You cannot avoid this completely, but you can help by uploading a clean, high quality file instead of a video that has already been compressed several times. Good starting settings - Resolution: 1080p, or 1080 by 1920 for vertical videos - Frame rate: match what you recorded, usually 30 fps - Bitrate: around 8 Mbps is a common starting point for 1080p at 30 fps - Format: MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, which works almost everywhere Common mistakes - Upscaling a low resolution video to 4K, which only makes the file bigger - Exporting at a very low bitrate to save space, which causes blur - Re-saving the same video again and again, which loses quality each time Keep a high quality original of every project. You can always make a smaller copy for sharing, but you can never bring back detail that was removed.