Video resolution 101

There is a lot of mumbo jumbo about video resolution, and people often confuse things because, let me be honest, things can quickly become very confusing. So, the whole point of my writing this up was to give absolute beginners an introduction to what video resolution is and clear the confusion around it to some extent.

When we look at a video clip, we’re essentially looking at a series of still images played back at a fast frame rate one after the other. Frame rate denotes how many images are displayed every second. The typical frame rate for a cinematic display of a video clip is 24 frames per second. However, there are other frame rates, such as 25 fps and 30 fps. Higher frame rates like 60 fps are also now uncommon to hear. At that high frame rate, everything appears very smooth.

Okay, so coming back to video resolution, what is video resolution, and how do we measure it? Video resolution denotes how many pixels there are in the footage. That means when compared to still pictures, there isn’t much of a difference.

We measure video resolution by how many pixels there are in a frame horizontally by how many pixels there are vertical. The higher the number of pixels horizontally by vertically, the higher is going to be the video resolution.

Standard resolutions used these days are full HD. That’s equal to 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels vertically. That’s the standard that’s widely accepted. However, for better and more future-proof resolution, people use the UHD resolution, which is 3840 pixels wide by 2160 pixels vertically. There are other resolutions as well, which are also quite popular and include DCI 4K and even 6K. DCI 4K resolution is 4096 pixels wide by 2160 pixels vertically.

The amount of resolution you need will depend on the broadcast parameters and where and how your video will be viewed if your video is going to be viewed on a smartphone, then even HD resolution, which is 1280 pixels by 720 pixels. However, if your video will be uploaded to a platform like YouTube, you better put the highest resolution up. This is because although many people will view the video in perhaps HD or full HD, a sizeable portion of the audience will watch the video on large 4K resolution TV. That means a higher resolution is going to be better for that audience.