Export quality

The Quality popup sets the data rate of the picture and the sound. A higher rate gives a better picture and a larger file.

Menu: File ▸ Export…
Keys: ⌘E
Where: Export sheet ▸ Quality
Agent tools: export

Choose a quality

Open the export sheet and pick a row in Quality: Format default, Low, Medium, High or Maximum. Each tier’s title shows the rate it would ask for at the size and frame rate now chosen, for example High · 8.0 Mbps.

Once you pick a tier, the footnote shows the rates too, for example H264 · MP4 · 8.0 Mbps · 256 kbps audio. With Format default it shows no rates.

Format default

The default row. Frame Job works the rate out from the frame’s size and rate:

Format	At 1080p, 30 fps	Bits per pixel per frame
H.264	About 8.7 Mbps	0.14
HEVC, HEVC with Alpha, HEVC 10-bit	About 4.4 Mbps	0.07
AV1, VP9	A cap of about 4.4 Mbps	0.07

The rate rises in step with the frame’s area and the frame rate, and it’s held between 1 and 200 Mbps. So H.264 at 1080p is about 8.7 Mbps at 30 fps, a little above High, and about 17.4 Mbps at 60 fps, where High is 12.0 Mbps.

The sound is 192 kbps AAC, or 192 kbps Opus in the WebM formats.

The four tiers

Each tier sets the rate from the frame’s size, so a tier means the same picture quality at every size. These are the H.264 rates at 30 fps or less:

Tier	Bits per pixel per frame	720p	1080p	4K	Sound
Low	0.064	1.8 Mbps	4.0 Mbps	15.9 Mbps	128 kbps
Medium	0.096	2.7 Mbps	6.0 Mbps	23.9 Mbps	192 kbps
High	0.129	3.6 Mbps	8.0 Mbps	32.1 Mbps	256 kbps
Maximum	0.193	5.3 Mbps	12.0 Mbps	48.0 Mbps	320 kbps

A preset stores the tier, not the number, so “High” works out the right rate on any document.

How the rate scales

Frame size. The rate scales with the frame’s area, using the size you chose rather than the canvas’s.
Frame rate. Above 30.5 fps the rate is 1.5 times higher, so 50 and 60 fps are raised and 29.97 and 30 fps aren’t. High at 1080p and 60 fps is 12.0 Mbps in H.264.
Codec. HEVC reaches the same picture at roughly 60 % of H.264’s rate, so the HEVC formats ask for 60 % of it, and AV1 and VP9 use the same figure. High at 1080p is 4.8 Mbps in HEVC.
Rounding. A rate is rounded to the nearest 100 kbps, and it never goes below 100 kbps.

Rates on AV1 and VP9

On AV1 and VP9 the rate is a soft cap. The encoder works to a constant quality chosen to match HEVC at that rate, so the file usually stays under it. Very detailed footage can go over, by up to about 1.25 times the rate on AV1 and about 1.15 times on VP9.

The tier titles and the footnote say so, for example High · usually ≤ 4.8 Mbps. AV1’s cap stops at 100 Mbps, the most its encoder takes.

On VP9 with Alpha (WebM) the rate covers the picture alone. The transparency is a second stream on top of it, so the file is larger than the rate says. See AV1 and VP9.

Sound rates

A tier sets the sound rate as well as the video rate.

Row	Sound
Format default	192 kbps
Low	128 kbps
Medium	192 kbps
High	256 kbps
Maximum	320 kbps

The H.264, HEVC and AV1 (MP4) formats use these as AAC rates. The WebM formats ask the same rates of their Opus sound, rounded to the nearest rate the Opus encoder offers.

Audio only (M4A) has no picture, so a tier sets its AAC rate alone, and its titles read High · 256 kbps.

When Quality greys out

Quality is greyed out for ProRes 422, ProRes 4444, WAV, AIFF, Animated GIF and Animated PNG, where the format fixes the rate. ProRes takes its rate from its profile and carries uncompressed sound, WAV and AIFF are uncompressed, and GIF and APNG have no rate at all.

With an agent

An agent doesn’t pick a tier. It passes video_bitrate and audio_bitrate to export in bits per second, so 8000000 is 8 Mbps, and leaving them out gives Format default. ProRes, GIF and APNG ignore video_bitrate, and ProRes, WAV and AIFF ignore audio_bitrate. See Export: start, then poll.