Rendering artifacts - break even point

Hello,

so my question is about the rendering quality and the artifacts in the video which comes with that. Generally when we render a video for example a 1080p export, we use 30000 Kb/s as quality setting. With that of course the file will be huge. We now want to keep the file size as small as possible. Currently we export our videos in mp4 witht that setting.
When we set the quality to for example 10000 or below then of course the quality of the videos suffer, but not only that we get artifacts. Is there a general rule of how low we can get on the export quality/render quality without getting artifacts in the video, Or should the artifacts in general not happen and they are another problem which we could solve another way?
We use mp4 to ensure all of our customers can playback without a problem.
We have two different source files, if we shot the project ourselves we use a BMPCC 4k, which we shoot in raw. If we get files from our external partner, the files are general .mov with a bitrate o 300 mb/s (through an external recorder)

best wishes
Dominik

Is there a general rule of how low we can get on the export quality/render quality without getting artifacts in the video

Variables like the content of the scene, quality of the encoder and the parameters you specify will all play a part here. The best idea I can offer is that with the following settings, I generally get excellent results.

(Adjust Resolution, Frame Rate and Key Frames to match your needs.)

Best Quality Encoding.jpg (81.37 KiB) Viewed 491 times

Is there a particular reason why you want smaller file sizes? I usually render UHD at 80Mbps which for a 25 min video comes out at roughly 12GB. Everything gets archived to external drives so I never have a space problem on my internal work drives.

Is there a general rule of how low we can get on the export quality/render quality without getting artifacts in the video

Variables like the content of the scene, quality of the encoder and the parameters you specify will all play a part here. The best idea I can offer is that with the following settings, I generally get excellent results.

(Adjust Resolution, Frame Rate and Key Frames to match your needs.)

Best Quality Encoding.jpg

Well that's in general how we export for our "normal" customers which buy and download the videos through our website. But to achive a small file size it's not an optimal setting

Is there a particular reason why you want smaller file sizes? I usually render UHD at 80Mbps which for a 25 min video comes out at roughly 12GB. Everything gets archived to external drives so I never have a space problem on my internal work drives.

Yes that's in general what we do for our main files for our website and for archiving them. However we are limited on specific sites to 3 GB, which is truely a pain. We currently work around and split the videos in different parts, which is not optimal. For that specific sites UHD is out of the question, but it is even a strugle to get FHD anywhere near that.

If I need smaller files, then I use x264 with the MeGUI front end.