{"id":21967,"date":"2019-10-29T13:21:16","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T13:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new_auto_quality_setting_for_content_aware_video_compression"},"modified":"2025-03-23T13:26:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-23T20:26:17","slug":"new_auto_quality_setting_for_content_aware_video_compression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/new_auto_quality_setting_for_content_aware_video_compression","title":{"rendered":"New Auto-Quality Setting for Content-Aware Video Compression"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s widely known that video<\/a> is the most effective way of communicating your brand to your audience. It is also an extremely varied medium. Take a look at the existing videos in your media library, you\u2019ll find videos with differing lengths, colors, brightness and density of content. All of these videos need to be optimized in a different way. Cloudinary\u2019s new automatic video quality<\/a> can intelligently analyze each and every video to encode it using the most optimized settings, ensuring the best trade-off between file size and visual quality, whilst also maintaining a consistent experience throughout. All you need to do is set the quality parameter to auto<\/code> (q_auto in URLs) and Cloudinary will take care of the rest.<\/p>\n

Video plays an important role across the web, but that comes at the cost of production time and bandwidth. Cloudinary\u2019s Dynamic Video Platform with on-the-fly encoding and manipulation offers up a simple way to improve the viewing experience with faster load times, whilst reducing bandwidth costs and saving time with video editing. However, up until now it\u2019s been a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to quality. Now you can properly automate video quality to ensure consistent appearance no matter the complexity.<\/p>\n

Consistently Inconsistent Automation<\/h2>\n

Cloudinary has always allowed you to define a specific quality value to use on your videos – most use 70 out of 100. Whilst this may seem like a great way to ensure all your videos appear with similar visual quality, this is not necessarily the case due to the wide-ranging content and resolutions<\/a> of your videos.<\/p>\n

Take the video of a croissant below, it\u2019s a simple, low resolution video with limited colors and a short duration. We\u2019ve set the quality to 70<\/code> which visually degrades the video even further. Now contrast this with the aerial video of a bridge, it is much higher resolution, involves more movement, landscapes and colors, and has a longer duration. We\u2019ve also set this to q_70<\/code>, and now we have a video that maintains a high quality but not necessarily the most optimal file size.<\/p>\n

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Editing your video delivery URLs will require Cloudinary to re-encode your videos. We recommend doing this eagerly<\/a> in advance of the new videos being delivered, to ensure your users are not waiting for this to happen when first requested.<\/p><\/div>\n

Fine Tuning the Experience for Efficient Video Optimization<\/h2>\n

We\u2019ve already seen how simple it is to deliver consistent content-aware videos but what if we want a little bit more control? The automatic quality parameter can take additional configuration options to make it work for all of your use-cases.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not going to want a super high-quality video all of the time. You might have some short thumbnail previews or want to aggressively reduce your bandwidth costs as a consequence of high-levels of traffic. For this you can use the eco<\/code> or low<\/code> options (q_auto:eco<\/code> or q_auto:low<\/code> in URLs). In the example below we\u2019ve taken the original video (5.95MB), and we\u2019ve reduced the video to thumbnail size and combined this with q_auto:low<\/code> to deliver a video that is just over 175KB.<\/p>\n
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On the flip-side, you might have some videos, such as product videos, that you really need to show off and deliver in the best quality possible. Of course you\u2019ll still get the benefits of Cloudinary\u2019s intelligent encoding to reduce the file-size but the effects won\u2019t be quite so dramatic. You can use the best<\/code> option to achieve this (q_auto:best<\/code> in URLs). Let\u2019s take the same video as above, but this time we want to deliver the full video in the best possible quality.<\/p>\n
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We\u2019ve delivered this video at 3.77MB and therefore managed to drop the file size by about a third, whilst also ensuring the video looks great visually.<\/p>\n

Comparing Video Quality<\/h3>\n

To get a better idea of how the various quality settings affect the appearance and size of the videos, take a look at the comparison below. Select a different auto quality setting and see how the hourglass video is affected. You can also try out a comparison with your own videos using our video comparator demo<\/a> for more.<\/p>\n

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\n https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/demo\/video\/upload\/w_600\/q_auto:low\/hourglass_timer.mp4<\/span><\/a>\n<\/div>\n
\n Quality: <\/span>\n auto:low<\/span><\/code>\n
\n Size: <\/span>\n 170.27KB<\/span><\/code>\n<\/div>\n
\n auto:low<\/span>\n auto:eco<\/span> \n auto:good<\/span>\n auto:best<\/span>\n 80<\/span>\n 100<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Here\u2019s the full list of automatic video quality settings:<\/p>\n