Bit rate is a very important factor for good video quality. In the camera settings we now find more numbers next to the resolution. The one behind Mbps interests us more now. This is the information about the bit rate.
This number indicates how much information is processed in the video per second. The higher this rate, the better the quality. Of course, the final file the camera produces will increase with the bit rate.
In this way, you can also calculate how much information is available for each frame, that is, each individual image. Suppose you are shooting with 25p and you have an available bit rate of 100 Mbps. That would mean that each image carries 4 Mbps of information. If you shot 50p at the same bit rate, it would only be 2 Mbps per image! The result would be a loss of image quality.
Color depth factor – How does it contribute to video quality?
Bottom line: color depth is the maximum number of different color shades that a camera can display. Of course, the same applies to monitors, printers, televisions, etc.
The colors in general in our image consist of additive combinations of the three basic colors red, blue and green.
The gradations in each tone are again given in bits. Videos consist of pixels, that is, square image points. Each of these pixels carries with it certain color information. The higher the bit rate of the color depth, the more different shades of color each pixel can have.
The total number of color tones is calculated by adding 2 to the power of the number of bits; for an 8-bit camera, for example, that would be 256 colors per base color. Now you have to multiply the other two basic colors again to determine the total number of possible color tones. This means that an 8-bit sensor can display 28 * 28 * 28 colors. That’s over 16 million shades!
Thus, a 10-bit camera can display more than 1 billion colors, a 12-bit camera 68 billion colors, and a 14-bit camera even more than 4 billion color combinations.
Summary:
Many users are not fully aware of how bit rate influences video quality.
People usually see numbers next to the name of the format (Mp4, MOV, AVI) and do not know exactly what it is.
Here we have tried to explain that the higher the bit rate, the more colors.
Perhaps you think that speaking of so many millions of colors, and it is enough, but it is not like that. Actually reality has a practically infinite number of color gamut, so to capture it with realism, it is necessary to have as many colors as possible.
