Adjusting bitrate settings for screen recording quality and file size
Bitrate is the setting that most directly controls the trade-off between screen recording quality and file size, and it’s one of the most commonly misunderstood controls in recording software. Understanding what it actually does — and what it doesn’t — makes it easier to set correctly for different types of content.
What bitrate actually controls
Bitrate is the amount of data your recording uses per second of video, expressed in kilobits or megabits per second (kbps or Mbps). A higher bitrate means more data is available to describe what’s on screen each second — which generally means better image quality, more detail preserved, and fewer visible compression artifacts. A lower bitrate means less data, which the encoder compensates for by making more aggressive compromises in what visual detail to preserve.
Critically, bitrate controls the budget the encoder has to work with — it doesn’t directly dictate what the image looks like. The encoder decides how to spend that budget based on what’s actually on screen. A static slide requires very little data to represent accurately even at a low bitrate. Fast-moving gameplay requires a lot of data to avoid visible artifacting even at a moderate bitrate. The same bitrate setting produces very different visual results for these two content types.
The relationship between content type and appropriate bitrate
Static screen content — a text document, a slide presentation, a settings menu with no animation — is the most forgiving content type for bitrate. Because most pixels aren’t changing between frames, the encoder can allocate its data budget efficiently, and a relatively low bitrate still produces a clean-looking recording. For this type of content, a bitrate of 4-8 Mbps at 1080p is typically sufficient.
Motion-heavy content — gameplay, animation, screen transitions, scrolling through rich visual content — requires meaningfully more data because many pixels change between frames and the encoder has to describe all of that change. For 1080p gameplay at 60fps, most practical guides recommend 15-25 Mbps for acceptable quality; for 4K content with significant motion, higher still. The storage guide covers what these bitrate choices mean for file size over a recording session.
Variable bitrate vs. constant bitrate: which to use
Most screen recording software offers a choice between CBR (constant bitrate, which uses the same data rate throughout regardless of what’s on screen) and VBR (variable bitrate, which adjusts the data rate to use more data for complex scenes and less for simple ones). For screen recording specifically, VBR is almost always the better choice — it naturally allocates more data where it’s needed (motion, complexity) and less where it isn’t (static content), producing better overall quality at the same average file size.
CBR has specific use cases in live streaming where a consistent network bandwidth is required, but for recordings that will be saved as files, VBR’s adaptive allocation is straightforwardly better for screen content.
Hardware encoding changes how bitrate translates to quality
As covered in the context of frame drops in our performance troubleshooting guide, hardware encoders (NVENC, AMF, QuickSync) and software encoders produce different visual quality at the same stated bitrate. At equivalent bitrate settings, a software encoder like x264 typically produces better visual quality than a hardware encoder — the hardware encoder’s advantage is speed and lower CPU load, not output quality per bit. This means a hardware-encoded recording may need a higher bitrate than a software-encoded one to produce equivalent visual results.
The file size math
At a constant 10 Mbps, one hour of recording produces approximately 4.5 GB of file data. At 25 Mbps (appropriate for 1080p60 gameplay), one hour produces around 11 GB. These numbers scale directly with bitrate and recording duration, which is why VBR matters for long recordings — a static screen recording session where most content is simple and static will produce a much smaller file at the same average bitrate than an equivalent-length gameplay recording.
Practical starting points for common recording contexts
For tutorial recordings of standard software at 1080p30: 6-10 Mbps VBR. For gameplay at 1080p60: 15-20 Mbps VBR. For fast-paced 4K content: 40+ Mbps. For recordings destined for web upload and further compression (YouTube, Vimeo), you can record at higher bitrate than the platform will ultimately use, since re-encoding always benefits from having more source data to work with.
Frequently asked questions
What bitrate should I use for a 1080p screen recording?
It depends on content — static application content works well at 6-10 Mbps; motion-heavy gameplay needs 15-25 Mbps at the same resolution. Use VBR rather than CBR when recording to a file.
Does a higher bitrate always mean better quality?
Not beyond a certain point — once the bitrate is high enough to represent all the detail in the frame accurately, additional bitrate produces larger files without visible quality improvement. The relevant ceiling depends on content type and resolution.
Related reading: How much storage do screen recordings actually use · Why your screen recording drops frames · Screen recording quality myths that aren’t actually true