What Bitrate Should 1080p Video Use?
For 1080p30, somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 kbps covers almost everything: around 3,500 kbps for a talking head, 5,000 for general footage, 8,000 or more for fast motion. At 60 fps, add roughly half again.
A table you can actually use
| Resolution | Quiet content | General | Fast motion |
|---|---|---|---|
| 360p30 | 400 kbps | 700 kbps | 1,000 kbps |
| 480p30 | 700 kbps | 1,200 kbps | 1,800 kbps |
| 720p30 | 1,500 kbps | 2,500 kbps | 4,000 kbps |
| 1080p30 | 3,000 kbps | 5,000 kbps | 8,000 kbps |
| 1080p60 | 4,500 kbps | 7,500 kbps | 12,000 kbps |
| 4K30 | 10,000 kbps | 20,000 kbps | 35,000 kbps |
These are for H.264. For H.265, take roughly 30% off each number for the same apparent quality.
Why "quiet" and "fast" differ so much
Encoders store differences between frames. A locked-off shot of someone talking barely changes, so most frames cost almost nothing. Rain, confetti, crowds, water, handheld pans and grain change every pixel every frame, and the encoder has to spend real bits on each one. That is why the same bitrate that looks flawless on an interview falls apart on a snowboarding clip.
The measure behind the table
Bits per pixel per frame — bitrate divided by (width × height × fps) — is what actually predicts how a file will look. Below about 0.04 it starts to look starved at any resolution; 0.08–0.10 is comfortable; above 0.15 you are mostly buying bytes.
It is also the sanity check when you have a size to hit. If your target works out to 0.02 bpp at 1080p, do not encode 1080p — the same bits at 720p land near 0.05 and the result is visibly better.
Better still, do not set a bitrate
Unless you have a size to hit, constant quality (CRF) beats picking a number from a table. It gives the difficult scenes what they need and the easy ones what they do not, and the file ends up the size this particular clip requires. Use a bitrate when there is a hard limit; use CRF when there is not.
Compress a video to 25 MB → Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.