Video Bitrate Calculator

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.