MP4 Compression Question

[nickflix]

Hi all! I filmed my daughter's dance recital and got asked to share it with the other parents. Since YouTube flags the music they played during the concert, I'm just planning on sending it via Drive or some other shareable site. The thing is, the final file is 20GB. I shot it on 1080p, Progressive, 48kHz AAC audio, 20.00 mbps Target, etc.. I find mp4/h.264 to be very user-friendly and universal (i.e. I won't have parents saying they can't play the file), but is there any way for me to make the file smaller while maintaining the quality? I messed with HEVC, but it barely changed and in one case, made the file bigger. 

Obviously I could go with 720p, but that seems a bit silly since most people have 1080 or 4K TVs and I'm sure they'll expect the highest quality. Thanks in advance. 

[neil wilkes]

The first thing I would do is to dump the awful MainConcept based stock MP4 encoder, and get a copy of the far superior TMPGEnc Encoder for Premiere Pro.

This is built on the superlative X264 Pro encoder, and it is so much better than the stock Adobe one it's just night & day superior. I use it for all MP4/H.264 and even for our Blu-ray authoring it's that good.

The next thing I would do is look at your settings. 20Mbps is simply too high for YouTube (although I admire the attitude 'better is, well, better' that you seem to have) and with this encoder you'll find you can easily cut the bitrates in half with no issues to worry about. Personally, I would use a 2-pass VBR in 'Very Slow' mode, with a peak at 10Mbps and a target set to 7.5Mbps at your shot resolution - that should be fine, although it is always advisable to do some test passages before the full film.

Please drop me a message or amend this if you need more?

[Peru Bob]

How many parents do you have to share with?

You can get 10 packs of 32GB flash drives on Amazon for a reasonable price.