High-bitrate video is visible. It is the sharp edge of a cliff, the glitter of a star. But the meaning of the video—the emotional weight of the Prince’s golden hair, the loneliness of the aviator—does not require a 400 Mbps ProRes stream.
Saint-Exupéry stripped adjectives from his prose until only the stark, beautiful truth remained. x264 strips redundant macroblocks from its frames until only the essential visual information remains. Remember the Fox from The Little Prince ? "What is essential is invisible to the eye." saint exupery x264
x264 understands that what is essential (the story, the emotion, the visual continuity) is invisible to the eye as a data rate. The encoder uses techniques like to trick your brain into seeing depth where raw math says there should be artifacts. High-bitrate video is visible