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If you need to record for a long period of time without stopping, a lower-quality format may be your answer, especially if you only plan to do light editing or no editing at all. For that, you’ll want a higher bit rate, a higher bit depth, higher color sampling, and a higher resolution.īut high quality means larger file sizes, which means your media cards will fill up faster, and you will have shorter recording times. You also probably want higher quality if you’re planning to transcode the footage, i.e., convert it to another format – which you may want to do at the end of your editing.
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You want high quality if you plan to do a lot of heavy editing with the footage, adding FX, doing color correction or grading, compositing/greenscreen, enlargements, reductions, picture-in-picture, etc. Lower-quality video will usually have smaller file sizes. The higher the quality – the higher the resolution, the higher the color depth, the higher the bit rate, using HDR – the larger the file size. The choice between formats when shooting usually comes down to quality vs. You may also only be able to access certain frame rates with certain codecs.
#Go pro video formats mp4
For example, if a camera offers a choice between AVCHD and MP4, chances are, AVCHD will be lower-quality and offer smaller frame sizes, while MP4 may offer larger frame sizes and more choices when it comes to frame rates, bit depth, and color sampling. The main differences between codecs here will be file size, and whether you can access a lot of different options like frame rate, bit rate, color sampling, and bit depth. You may get to choose the specific codec you want to record in.
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It will usually record to a preset codec which you can’t change.Ī video camera, including a DSLR, may give you many more choices. When shooting video, you may or may not have a lot of control over what format you shoot, depending on the kind of camera you’re using.Ī phone camera will usually give you a few choices: resolution/frame size (usually Full HD or UHD), frame rate, and possibly High Dynamic Range (HDR).
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