Best Practices for Setting Resolution and Bitrate
Optimizing camera settings is a common step in most installations. While Camera defaults try to be a one-size fits all in terms of quality and picture settings, there are many times when manual intervention is required in order to meet storage retention limits, bandwidth limits and overall quality needs.
Below are definitions of the 2 commonly adjusted parameters and how they will affect the video stream. As well as some best practices in regards to setting the bitrate for different resolution and frame rate combinations.
Definitions:
Resolution: The level of detail the image provides. Resolution refers to how many pixels the camera can provide in an image. Resolution can also be described as megapixel. Megapixel is the count of how many million pixels are in an image. For example, 1080p resolution is comparable to 2MP.
Bitrate: The amount of data used to encode data in a video. Bitrate usually goes by the number of bits per second (bps). The file size of saved video correlates to the set bitrate. Increasing the bitrate will increase the image quality and file size, to a point. Inversely, lowering the bitrate will lower the overall image quality and also lower the file size.
Best Practices:
Resolution and bitrate are closely tied to each other. A best practice is to keep the resolution setting set to the default, but if a change of frames per second (FPS) or resolution is necessary, reference the below table to set an optimized bitrate.
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