Video bitrate calculator
Bitrate on its own means nothing without the resolution and frame rate behind it. Ten megabits is generous for 1080p30 and starves 4K60 completely. Thinking in bits per pixel per frame makes it portable: around 0.1 is fine for streaming, 0.15 for good quality, and 0.25 or more for a master. That single figure travels across resolutions in a way a megabit number never does.
Video bitrate is width × height × frame rate × bits per pixel. At 1080p30 and a streaming quality of 0.1 bits per pixel, that is 6.22 Mbps — about 466 MB for ten minutes, or 2.8 GB an hour.
How to choose a bitrate
Modern codecs change the arithmetic substantially. These figures assume something H.264-like; HEVC delivers similar quality at roughly 50% of the bitrate and AV1 better still, at the cost of far more encoding time and patchier hardware support. Content matters too — a static talking head compresses to a fraction of what fast-moving grainy footage needs, which is why constant-quality encoding usually beats a fixed bitrate for anything not being streamed live.
Questions
Around 6 to 10 Mbps for good H.264 streaming at 30 fps, roughly double for 60 fps.