What is a bit rate?
Detailed explanation of bit rates for video and music files
What is a bit rate?
Bitrate is an unavoidable experience in video editing and music production.
The word bit rate sounds a bit complicated, but of course, video and audio files. It is also often found in various situations, such as mobile phones and internet lines.
What is the bit rate? It’s surprisingly useful to remember it sensually, so remember it.
I think the person who visited this page is a beginner asking “What is bitrate?” So I hope I can explain it in the easiest and simplest way possible.
Bit rate basics
To briefly explain the bit rate, it refers to the amount of data per second for communication, such as video files, music files, and the Internet.
The so-called reproduction and communication are data streams. This stream uses a unit called bps (bit per second) to indicate how many bits flow in one second (per second).
I think it is easy to understand if you can imagine the road that a car passes by. The car is the data and the data stream is the road.
Taking into account that a road with many cars carries many people and luggage, it can be said that a lot of data (information) flows. This is called high bit rate.
On the contrary, if there are few cars in motion, it can be said that little data (information) flows. This is called a low bit rate.
Image of many cars on the road.
A state in which the amount of data is large and the bit rate of the stream is high
Image that there are not many cars on the road.
A state in which the amount of data is small and the bit rate is low
Should the bit rate be high?
A high bit rate means a lot of information. If there is a lot of information, it sounds great, like high image quality for videos and high sound quality for music, but it has a big disadvantage.
The disadvantage of a high bit rate is that it increases the data capacity of a single file. If the data capacity is too large, it can take time to send someone or move data between hard drives, making it difficult to manage.
Therefore, the codec was developed to reduce data capacity while maintaining high image quality and high sound quality. I’ll talk about codecs another time, but it is necessary to set the bitrate keeping in mind the balance between image quality, sound quality and file capacity so that the data capacity is easy to handle.
