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Video Bitrate Calculator

Enter width, height, frame rate and motion level to estimate the video bitrate.

How it is calculated

The estimate is bitrate (bit/s) = width × height × fps × M × 0.07, with width and height in pixels, fps in frames per second and M the motion multiplier: 1 for low, 2 for medium and 4 for high. Any other motion value falls back to medium. The bit rate is divided by 1,000,000 to give Mbps. Storage per hour is Mbps × 3600 / 8 / 1000 gigabytes, using decimal units (1 GB = 1000 MB). The figure covers the video stream only; audio, container overhead and the codec you choose are not part of it, so treat the result as a starting point and adjust after a test encode.

Worked example

A 1920×1080 video at 30 fps with medium motion (M = 2). Pixels per frame: 1920 × 1080 = 2,073,600. Per second: 2,073,600 × 30 = 62,208,000. Times the motion factor 2 is 124,416,000, and times 0.07 gives 8,709,120 bit/s, which is 8.71 Mbps. One hour is 8.71 × 3600 / 8 / 1000 = 3.92 GB of video data.

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Common mistakes

  • Using the same motion level for every kind of footage. A talking-head clip (low) and a football match (high) differ by a factor of four in the result.
  • Treating the output as the exact bitrate to upload. It is a rule-of-thumb starting value, and platforms or codecs such as H.265 can look good at lower rates.
  • Mixing up megabits and megabytes: 8.71 Mbps is megabits per second, which is about 1.09 megabytes per second, not 8.71 MB/s.
  • Forgetting audio. The hourly size covers video only, so add the audio track (often 128 to 320 kbps) when planning storage.
  • Entering the display size of the player rather than the encoded resolution of the file.

About this calculator

The Kush Gauge is a widely used rule-of-thumb formula for estimating an appropriate video bitrate from resolution, frame rate, and a motion-complexity factor, expressed roughly as bitrate = width × height × frame rate × motion factor × 0.07. Higher-motion content (sports, action) needs a larger motion factor than low-motion content (talking-head interviews) to look equally clean at the same resolution.

Setting the bitrate too low produces visible compression artifacts and blockiness, especially in fast-moving scenes; setting it needlessly high wastes storage and bandwidth without a visible quality gain. Video editors, streamers, and platform encoding engineers use Kush Gauge-style estimates as a starting point when configuring export or streaming settings, then check the resulting file size per hour against their storage or bandwidth budget.

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  • Editorial team

    The motion setting does most of the work: dropping from medium to low halves the target, so 1080p at 30 fps goes from 8.71 to 4.35 Mbps, while high doubles medium to 17.42 Mbps. Treat the figure as a starting point for a short test encode, since codecs differ. What kind of footage are you encoding, and which bitrate looked right after your own test?

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