I’m looking at my library and I’m wondering if I should process some of it to reduce the size of some files.
There are some movies in 720p that are 1.6~1.9GB each. And then there are some at the same resolution but are 2.5GB.
I even have some in 1080p which are just 2GB.
I only have two movies in 4k, one is 3.4GB and the other is 36.2GB (can’t really tell the detail difference since I don’t have 4k displays)
And then there’s an anime I have twice at the same resolution, one set of files are around 669~671MB, the other set 191 each (although in this the quality is kind of noticeable while playing them, as opposed to the other files I extract some frames)
What would you do? what’s your target size for movies and series? What bitrate do you go for in which codec?
Not sure if it’s kind of blasphemy in here talking about trying to compromise quality for size, hehe, but I don’t know where to ask this. I was planning on using these settings in ffmpeg, what do you think?
I tried it in an anime at 1080p, from 670MB to 570MB, and I wasn’t able to tell the difference in quality extracting a frame form the input and the output.
ffmpeg -y -threads 4 -init_hw_device cuda=cu:0 -filter_hw_device cu -hwaccel cuda -i './01.mp4' -c:v h264_nvenc -preset:v p7 -profile:v main -level:v 4.0 -vf "hwupload_cuda,scale_cuda=format=yuv420p" -rc:v vbr -cq:v 26 -rc-lookahead:v 32 -b:v 0
Movies? 4-8GB for most 60-120 minute features. TV shows. For live action 800MB/episode, 500MB/ episode for animation. For hour long stuff probably 1.2-1.6GB/episode.
HEVC 10 bit. I target in the 7000-9000kbps bitrate range generally. For animation that can be as low as 3000-5000kbps. Sometimes a bit higher for very grainy old films, occasionally a little lower for grain less modern digital camera work that hasn’t had digital grain added.
If you want to maximize space savings without losing quality you have to understand what needs more bitrate and what can do with less. Across the board you could do something like CRF 20 but you’d have outliers where you don’t get enough bitrate and those where you still end up with rates of 14,000kbps.
The above is for 1080p content.
If you can stand HD video content at 2-3000kbps more power to you but on a large TV I can tell. I think even being reckless and not caring about future-proofing less than 6000kbps is a bad idea for anything but TV shows. Even those I think outside animation you want minimum 2000kbps for 1080p.