
Currently we find countless video formats. Depending on the quality you are looking for, the video will be exported one way or another. In this post I help you differentiate and understand each of the formats and codecs so that I can apply it to your editing projects.
You can find various formats intended for both web pages and videos on Youtube or Vimeo, as well as to project in cinema quality or to view them on your mobile device or Tablet.
camera_2If there were no different video formats, we would be very limited when it came to doing any type of video production, since they would occupy countless megabytes, and they would all have extreme quality, which would make it difficult to carry out projects for an exclusive job. By the way, if you are looking for websites to download copyright free videos for your projects, here I leave you the best free video pages in HD and 4K
It is not the same to export a quality video for YouTube or any online platform than to export them for a mobile device or a film shoot. Each one has essential characteristics that make everything optimized to get the most out of your production.
Many times the problem with all these options and formats is compatibility. Each device records in a different format and we can have problems when playing them, so it is very interesting to know what options there are and how to manage them to avoid headaches.
The first of all is to differentiate between these important concepts:
Definition of container format and video codec
To clarify concepts it is important to define what a container format is with what a video codec is, totally different things. The container format is the file format, the drawer that encompasses all the material (video, audio, etc.) while the video codec is the format that is related to the part of the video and is not absolutely essential.
Container format: Every video file has a format inside, which can be AVI, MPG, H264, MOV, WMV etc. This one has several elements inside, among them the video and the audio generally. But they could also contain embedded subtitles, even multiple audio files with different languages.
Video codecs: Video codecs are the files that are inside the container format, therefore you have to know how to differentiate these two concepts. If there are no codecs there would be no problem since these are files that help compression. Depending on the choice of the codec you can have worse or better quality.









