Encoding recommendations
In addition to settings found on this page, you may want to include the following general video settings.
tuning
tuning:String
API Versions: V1, V2
Parent: outputs
Valid Values: film, animation, grain, psnr, ssim, fastdecode, or zerolatency
Compatible Job Types: All
Example: film
Description:
Tune the output video to optimize for a specific content type, or a specific encoding priority.
Behind the scenes, this sets the x264 --tune option.
Possible values:
- film - optimized for most non-animated video content (not only feature films).
- animation - optimized for animation. Note that most 3D animation behaves more like film and not like hand-drawn animation, so only use this for hand-drawn animation (anime, classic Disney, etc.).
- grain - optimized for film with high levels of grain.
- psnr - uses "peak signal-to-noise ratio" to optimize video quality.
- ssim - uses "structural similarity" to optimize video quality.
- fastdecode - reduces encoding complexity, to allow for easier decoding.
- zerolatency - x264 will keep an internal buffer of frames to improve quality; this setting removes that buffer, but reduces quality.
{
"input": "s3://zencodertesting/test.mov",
"outputs": [
{
"tuning": "film"
}
]
}
crf
crf:Integer
API Versions: V1, V2
Parent: outputs
Valid Values: 1-51
Compatible Job Types: All
Example: 26
Description:
CRF is a bitrate-control setting, and sets a constant ratefactor. This is closely related to constant quantizer encoding, though CRF mode generally achieves better compression than constant Q encoding by reducing the quantizer quality on "less important" frames. Read more about crf.
The Zencoder Quality setting determines an appropriate CRF for a given video. So if you set both Quality and CRF, the CRF setting will override Quality.
Valid values are 0-51, with lower values being better quality. Generally speaking, you shouldn't have to go below 16; 16 is nearly lossless for most files. Around 24 usually looks pretty good. Around 35 looks pretty compressed.
{
"input": "s3://zencodertesting/test.mov",
"outputs": [
{
"crf": "26"
}
]
}