Formats, Specs & Delivery

Six articles about the settings that decide whether a video plays, how good it looks, and what it costs to store. The first two are the foundation: what a codec actually is as distinct from a container, why editing codecs and delivery codecs are opposites, and how bitrate and resolution relate — including why raising resolution without raising bitrate makes a video worse rather than better. The third separates a delivery specification into the half that never changes and the half that is platform policy and needs checking every time, which is a more durable answer than any table of current limits. The fourth covers frame rate: what twenty-four, thirty and sixty each do to motion, why shutter speed rather than frame rate produces the look people call cinematic, and exactly which mixed-rate conversions judder. The fifth is about loudness, and it starts from the fact that peak level does not measure what listeners hear — then explains why platform normalisation has made the old habit of mastering as loud as possible actively counterproductive. The last is arithmetic: bitrate divided by eight, times duration, times cameras, which is the calculation that turns a storage emergency into a line on a shoot plan. Where figures are given they are ranges rather than fixed values, because the requirement depends on the footage. Where a platform's current rules matter, the articles say to check them rather than repeating numbers that will be stale. Learning which category a given setting falls into is more durable than memorising any of the values in it.