#practice
2 articles
01
·Media in Production·★ MEMBER·7 min read
How to Read Encoder Settings — What CRF, Presets, and 2-Pass Actually Change
The flags in an ffmpeg command — -crf 23, -preset slow, -pass 2 — each answer a different question: what to hold constant (CRF), how hard to search (preset), and whether to read the whole video first (2-pass). We derive why each knob works from the quantization-step formula and rate-distortion optimization, then land on copy-paste-ready commands and the mistakes that bite in production.
02
·Media in Production·★ MEMBER·9 min read
Designing a Bitrate Ladder — The First Job You Get in Streaming
Why one video needs several renditions. From how ABR works to rate-distortion curves per resolution and the convex hull that picks your rungs, the three ways excess bitrate costs you, how PSNR, SSIM and VMAF differ and which one decides, and per-title encoding — ending in a step-by-step procedure from choosing clips to keeping the ladder honest.