Adobe Premiere / Handbrake.

Yea - It looks like the bitrate did the trick.

I lowered it to that same 1.2ish... it's an MP4 btw.

and I honestly don't see much of a difference in quality from the exported file and the handbraked file.

Thanks for the help everyone!!

Please understand that I am not  a professional editor and don't know as much as most people in this forum.

My understanding of your post was that you export from PPRO and it is nice but really BIG FILE and you need to deliver a smaller file to the podcast host. So therefore you convert it in Handbrake.  You said it becomes about HALF the size in byte count and the quality is still nice.

And you want to do that straight out of PPro to avoid the extra step of conversion ??  Maybe I misunderstood what is going on.

My gut feeling is that you are exporting ( THIS IS A WILD GUESS ) mp4 with H264 codec. Handbrake uses H265 which roughly HALFS the size of the file. Those are wild guesses... so maybe just lowering bit rate will be perfect !

A caveat ….

If you lower the bit rate from PPro, it WILL lower the byte count, but the quality may suffer, so you'd have to do a test on a small section of your video ( just move work bars so you only export a small section and don't waste time doing the whole thing).

Go to the Media export menu ...

Select H.264 and Match Source - High bitrate

Or one of these options which suits you according to the level of compression you can accept or the video file size you need.

These export options will give you the same results as HandBrake.

Regards!

hehe. I didn't have a clue when I started learning stuff so it's normal I think to get info as you go along.

A wrapper is something that holds the codec inside it. Codec stands for COmpression DECompression.

Samples of wrappers are MOV AVI MP4 and so on. Usually it is denoted in the filename as the extension ( after the period).

E.G.  myfile.mov   myfile.avi   myfile.mp4

The codec is 'inside' and mediainfo can give you that info in TREE VIEW.

Mediainfo also gives you tons more info ( like bitrate, frame rate, all sorts of stuff ).

Most people just take a screenshot of the info from mediainfo and post it here so everyone sees pretty much exactly what you got.

Samples of codes are things like DNxHD, H264, PRORES, and so on.

Since all these codecs have different characteristics they will create different size files in byte count ( overall size of file).

Since we don't know what you export from PPRO and since we don't know what you got converted to in Handbrake, it is not exactly accurate to just say to you " lower the bit rate "... unless your export is the same as the conversion wrapper and codec.

hope that helps.

might as well also say what the codec is inside some 'wrapper'... like, if you export from PPro one wrapper and codec, then handbrake converts to another wrapper and codec, it sorta doesn't matter much what the bitrate info is.

I only use old version of PPro ( cs6). So I don't know what codecs you get from CC natively.

I no longer use Handbrake and when I did it was years ago.

However, Handbrake now uses H265, which compresses about 2X what H264 does, without a big difference in quality ( if any).

High Efficiency Video Coding - Wikipedia

So, basically, if you can get H265 into your PPro version, and choose that codec when creating your stuff, you may be able to bypass the conversion