#x264

1 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.