Average Bitrate?

Hello, good night.

What is Average Bitrate and how does it influence the quality of my animation in After Effects?
What is the recommended Mbps value?

Thank you,
Carol

Hi,
Pond5 will consistently compress our files to a smaller size for the website. This means that if your files have a low bitrate, especially when using VBR1/VBR2, particularly in animations with gradients, you may experience color banding or undesired artifacts.

I typically strive to prevent color banding by opting for a higher bitrate and employing CBR, normally in more dynamic animations. VBR, which stands for Variable Bitrate, involves an average of video encoding of 1 or 2 passes (VBR1, VBR2) . Consequently, each time you utilize VBR or a low bitrate, you ultimately achieve a smaller file size than with CBR, but at the cost of increased rendering time.

In short: To avoid color banding when using "Drop shadows", "gradients", neon Lights or blue darker animations in After Effects, my advice is to use CBR with the maximum bitrate.

My usual setup is as follows:
HD: H.264, 120 or 135 Mbps in CBR
4K/8K: 240 Mbps in CBR.

Cheers!

@JUMPCUTFILMS - "I typically strive to prevent color banding by opting for a higher bitrate and employing CBR, normally in more dynamic animations."

Do you find this also applies to HD and 4K video footage - not just dynamic animations?

Have you observed any obvious artifacts or banding in footage uploaded to P5 with VBR?

I've struggled with which to use in past - currently using VBR with H.265 codec.

Adobe says this about VBR -
"While VBR is typically harder for devices to play back — since the bit rate constantly changes — it provides much higher video quality without massive file sizes. It’s best used for videos that will be either progressive downloads (like on YouTube or Vimeo) or direct downloads."
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/video/hub/guides/what-is-variable-bit-rate.html

and AT&T's "Best Practices" indicate VBR is preferable -
https://developer.att.com/video-optimizer/docs/best-practices/variable-bitrate

Hi PCD,
It's just regarding animations. Color banding is a "daily thing" in Cinema 4d, Unreal or After Effects. For video footage most cases never had problems although i had some strange artifacts in the past using "denoiser" plugin with render in CBR h.264.

For video I use both codecs. It really depends of the video footage and the amount of plugins i use like twixtor, denoiser, motion blur or how much i push in Lumetri and color balance. If i use Lightroom with lightroom timelapse and try some AI color filter setups seems to me i get better results with CBR most of the times.

Thank you for providing links.

I agree in both link cases. I think for video H. 265 is superior to H. 264 in terms of compression and image quality. If I intend to stream a large amount of videos i will go for H.265 VBR for sure but for selling footage? i don't know i am still not convinced to do that for all videos. So, in short i actually still use both.

Your responses were enlightening.
I saved the videos with your recommendations and achieved excellent results.

Thank you very much, everyone, for your assistance.
Wishing everyone a great week ahead.