Video quality
Also known as: image quality, picture quality
Not one property but several that interact with each other, and confusing them is why most arguments about quality go nowhere at all in practice.
Updated
What it means
Quality decomposes into separate things. Resolution is how many pixels there are, Bitrate is how much data describes them, the codec decides how efficiently, and the lens and sensor decide what was there to record.
They trade against each other rather than adding up. A high Resolution at a low bitrate looks worse than a lower resolution at a generous one, which is the trade most people get the wrong way round.
Exposure and focus outrank all of it. A sharp, well exposed 1080p clip beats a soft, badly exposed 4K one in every comparison that anybody would actually sit down and make.
How it works in practice
Bitrate is the lever that matters most in delivery. Raising it improves a compressed clip visibly, where raising resolution at the same data rate makes it worse rather than better.
The source sets the ceiling. Nothing in grading, scaling or sharpening adds detail that was never recorded, so Oversampling from a larger frame is the only honest way to gain any.
Judging it needs the right screen. A clip assessed on a phone hides problems a television reveals, and the device the audience actually uses is the one any decision should be made on.
What to watch out for
The word gets used for four different things in one sentence. Somebody complaining about quality may mean sharpness, compression, stutter or colour, and the fix differs completely in each case.
What a viewer experiences is a separate question. Perceived quality diverges from any measurement, which is why a file that stalls is remembered as worse than one that is technically inferior.
Platform processing has the last word. Platform recompression re-encodes an upload to its own targets, so the quality a viewer finally sees is never exactly the quality that was delivered to the platform.
How RawClip handles it
Clips are selected partly on measurable quality, so a soft, shaking or badly exposed shot loses to a cleaner one covering the same moment. The delivered encode favours a file that plays reliably over one that maximises a single specification.