Question:

Why do you ask for a different bitrate when submitting our films?

The bitrate or streaming rate, is an encoding setting you configure when rendering your film. It controls the speed at which the data in your encoded film can be streamed through the decoder. The larger the streaming rate the more information is available to the decoder. Most HD (720 and 1080) projection equipment won’t present a noticeable difference in picture with the larger stream rates. UHD and 4k systems will, but we (and honestly most short film fests) don’t screen on those. The bottom line is 8MB seems to be the sweet spot and any if set larger, it just produces a significantly larger video file with no perceptible visual difference. This stinks for all of us when we are trying to upload and download a large number of films.

A good rule of thumb – if your film is less than 15 minutes TRT and your final rendered file is larger than 1GB, you probably have the bit rate set too high.

What can you do?...If you render your own copies, choose the lower 8Mb bit rate,in the resolution of your choice, and watch the size of your movie file drop dramatically. If you have a post house or editing service render your copies, just ask for a rendered version in the lower bitrate.