Where are the bitrate settings?

Question

I just installed blender for making youtube intros. I keep getting a "bitrate above max bitrate" sign whenever I render a video I made. So how do I change my bit rate?

Answer 1

UPDATE: Starting with blender 2.79 the encoding options are available only if you enable FFmpeg Video.

A new section for Encoding is available then to choose the video container, codec and also the bitrate .

To manually input Bitrate settings the output quality must be set to

None, use constant bit-rate

For older versions of blender:

Bitrate is found under the encoding tab. Make sure you are on a video format so that the tab is visible.

The image contains some sample settings. Adjust them to fit your needs.

Answer 2

Usually you don't even want to set the bitrate manually; having control over the quality of the output is often enough. Try lowering the quality setting, that'll also lower the average bitrate, but keeps a higher bitrate in fast-moving parts of the video, and allows a lower bitrate for simpler / static parts of the video.

By changing the encoding speed to something slower you can get the same quality at a lower bitrate, but at the expense of a slower export.