Design a per-title (content-aware) encoding ladder that adapts bitrate and resolution rungs to each source's complexity instead of using one fixed ladder for all content

Steps

1. Run a fast complexity analysis pass per title (e.g., scene/shot-level spatial and temporal detail, or a quality-metric-guided search such as VMAF at several bitrate/resolution points) before committing to final encode settings
2. Build a convex hull of resolution/bitrate/quality points for that specific title and select the rungs that maximize quality at each target bitrate, rather than reusing the same fixed rung set for every asset
3. Drop rungs where the marginal quality gain between two adjacent bitrates is negligible for this title - common on low-complexity or animated content, which needs far less bitrate than a conservative fixed ladder assumes
4. Cap the resolution ceiling at the highest rung that still shows a meaningful quality improvement, avoiding upscale-only rungs that add storage/delivery cost without a visible benefit
5. Validate the resulting per-title ladder against your existing fixed baseline ladder using an objective quality metric (VMAF/PSNR) across a representative content sample before rolling it out broadly
6. Track compute and storage cost per title, since content-aware analysis adds encoding passes on top of the final renditions