PPro export produces massive files or terrible quality

I'm not sure I can help you with this as I don't work at such low bitrates. Maybe someone else can help.

Couple of things, though - in your first post you said the source file is 1920x1080, but you are editing on a 1280x720 timeline, is that your intent? This is forcing Premiere to resize each frame.

Also, have you tried using a Constant Bit Rate?

MtD

Jim's responses were always tending to the short, pungent, and cryptic. Pithy, perhaps. But also directly aimed at the 'core' issue of the question. When I first started out 'here', he and "shooternz" Craig tended to give short, blunt, and rather hard responses. They spent little time writing, but actually within their posts were the answers. They didn't worry about emotional niceties, expected working adults could deal with short direct comments.

These days so many do find that offensive. I miss them both, as they gave help from a depth of experience to so many. And the "curmudgeonly" responses were something I was used to from growing up.

Jim's answers in this case were exactly as described ... short, direct, aimed at the problem. No attempt to be condesceding or curt, just no attempt at being emotionally supportive either. "You got X problem, do Y." Becuase in his experience, doing Y would simply fix the problem now and everyone could move on.

His last comment that you objected to is still in that vein ... because if you can't control the recording process, bluntly, you do have to then deal with all the crap later. Which will necessarily involve compromises. I can't see anything he said that was in any way rude or not to the point about the issue.

It wasn't emotionally supportive and empathetic, because to Jim that was a waste of time typing. It was brief but both accurate and comprehensive.

Quite a few posts on this and other forums are from people who don't want to do the "long way" to do something, but want the same results via some shortcut of some kind. Occasionally you can cut some major corners and still have the apparent quality or usefulness of the end product. Quite frequently, if you cut the corners, you have to choose between which lowered quality items you will deem acceptable.

And there are times when peole get very angry when told they can't get "there" the way they want to do it. Should we lie to them? No ... they're adults. We all need to deal with limitations.

Including Premiere's. It's been built for a primarily broadcast workflow. It's not a re-muxer ... and if you don't know what that is, look it up. Which is why Premiere re-encodes long-GOP H.264 media. Premiere can use intraframe previews in the "smart previews" process for the final encode if the previews and final export are to the same format/codec. But again, Premiere will have re-encoded every frame.

Workflow needs vary. For those who need to just cut & re-connect sections of an H.264 file, a re-muxing app is what you probably want to work with.

Neil