How to get the best balance of quality, performance and storage usage when uploading videos to SyncSketch
It is important to understand that uploaded videos are transcoded by SyncSketch, using encoding settings that strike a good balance of quality, fast loading, scrubbing responsiveness, and browser/device compatibility.
There are two factors that determine the quality of the videos in SyncSketch reviews: The quality of the file you upload, and the encoding settings used when transcoding. Any customer can maximize the quality of the transcode by uploading a high-quality file to start with. Customers on Enterprise or Education Plus plans can also adjust the settings used to transcode in order to adjust the balance of quality, performance and storage consumption.
Uploading quality videos
Uploading videos that are overly large may consume space and upload time unnecessarily, but overly compressing the videos you upload may impact the quality of the transcoding. You may need to experiment to find the format with the minimum file size that has results that meets your team's needs.
See our Supported Formats and Supported Resolutions lists for information about the generous variety of formats supported for upload.
Tuning the transcode
Some content may require higher bitrate settings to look suitable in SyncSketch, regardless of upload quality. Conversely, it's sometimes more important that the video loads faster after selecting the item, or consumes less storage space. Use SyncSketch's custom encoding settings to adjust the bitrates and quality up or down for incoming videos to meet your specific priorities.
🎖️ Our custom encoding settings are only available for accounts on an Enterprise or Education Plus plan.
Video/Audio Bitrate Settings
These encoding settings can be tuned an a per-Project basis, or enforced at the Workspace level in order to manage storage usage.
Enforcing custom settings
Open the Workspace Settings and choose the Settings tab
Navigate to Encoding. The first settings listed will be for adjusting the video and audio bitrates.
"Long Videos" are videos over three minutes, "Short Videos" are under 3 minutes. We've provided recommended settings, but you can adjust these up or down to fit your needs.
Project-level settings
You can also set preferred encoding settings at the Project level (though any custom Workspace settings take precedence).
From the Project Overview, go to the Manage button (gear icon) and select Edit Project Settings…
Then navigate to Encoding at the left:
If any settings have been changed from the recommended defaults in the Workspace settings, changes in this dialog will be ignored, and the warning shown above in yellow will indicate that the Workspace-level settings are being enforced.
Image Compression Settings
Settings to adjust the compression on still images can be found directly below the video and audio bitrate settings.
The default value here is 85% to keep things speedy while still providing sufficient image quality. Feel free to adjust this higher if you value image quality over performance.
Bypassing transcoding entirely
If your video is already encoded in a format suitable for playback in a browser, you can try uploading without transcoding at all. Transcoded video does not count toward your storage usage, so the main benefit is a shorter upload/ingestion time.
To do this, hold Shift while you drag video files into the Review.
Note that if watermarking is enabled, transcoding will happen regardless.
If you or your synced reviewers experience degraded playback and scrubbing performance, however, it is recommended to re-upload the asset, allowing the transcoding to occur normally.
Our transcoding settings include other features unrelated to bitrate to improve performance. Therefore it is generally recommended to take advantage of our transcoding for the best SyncSketch experience.