Lowered Bitrate after editing Video on iPhone (12 mini)

Question

Lowered Bitrate after editing Video on iPhone (12 mini)

Hey guys,

let's say I recorded a 4K 30FPS video on my iPhone 12 mini.

File size according to iOS: 150MB

If I save it to iCloud via the Files App, it actually is 150MB.

Now I edit the Video in the iOS Photos app. Let's say I just increase the Brightness by 1.

If I now save the edited Video to iCloud, the file size is now 50MB.

The original video has a birate of 40Mbps.

The edited video has a bitrate of 13 Mbps. Hence the lowered file size.

Problem is, that it significantly reduced the video quality.

Why does that happen and how do I get a "full" bitrate version of the edited Video?

Any help is appreciated.

iPhone 12 mini

Posted on Jun 4, 2024 2:42 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 7

20,652 points

Jun 5, 2024 1:47 AM in response to Admiral_Adonis

Recording devices (cameras, mobile phones etc) usually use quite high bitrates for the original footage. Usually much lower bitrates can be used if re-encoding must be done after pixel edits like adjusting brightness are done (straight cuts could be done losslessly (but to the GOP which is ~1-2(-8) second intervals), though).

But if the footage has low quality or lots of action (low light and noise, confetti etc) the default re-encoding bitrate might be too low and you might have to use other utilities (Final Cut Pro with Compressor, 3rd party apps) to edit the movie.

I guess the reason why there is no option in stock Photos app for that is that otherwise the plethora of available options is easily overwhelming to the casual average user.

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Answer 2

Jun 18, 2024 5:06 PM in response to Matti Haveri

Thanks for the input, makes sense.

For anyone interested: If you got an iPhone 13 or later, you can enode your videos to ProRes via a shortcut.

Editing the ProRes file shouldn't yield a quality loss.

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Lowered Bitrate after editing Video on iPhone (12 mini)

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