40 times the original filesize?

hi, noob here.
im just testing the free version atm, but my first few renders are horrible, not in picture quality mind you, that is quite ok.
but i cant get it to use my GPU (3080) and the mp4 files i rendered came out with about 40 times the original filesize? what the hell am i doing wrong? i have 5 TB of files to render and sure as hell dont have 200TB of spare hdd-space, lol.
source is around 2500x2000 mp4.h264 upscaled 200% with artemis low quality.

should i use another output like h265? and how do i get it to use my GPU? as far as i can tell it only uses the VRAM of my gpu, letting it idle at 0-1% and uses about 50% of my 5800x CPU.
edit: just in case, yes, the gpu is set as renderer in the settings.

If you are exporting to MP4 H264, what number did you set in the Constant Rate Factor ?

had to check, that is set to 20. no idea what it does.
edit: also my 20hour render(settings in the OP) just completed, it bloated my 1,1GB source up to 48GB… that is just nuts.
realy hope someone can tell me what im doing wrong.

OK. That is the “target quality” setting. Generally the videos you see on Youtube are videos with that set at 4… meaning targeting “4,000 KBPS”. Not “20”. you can use 5 for uploadable videos. You can use 3 in a pinch. And you can use 10 if you’re actually using it as editable footage, but “h264” is a codec, not a quality. An H264 video can be as big or as small as you need it to be depending on the quality you need. – That said, if you intake a copy of a video that was a 2… and you output it as a 20… you stopped benefitting from the additional file size around 10 doublings ago.
40 times the size is not only reasonable… depending on your purpose and level of commitment… it’s also completely irrelevant to the technical answer depending on the user’s question. - For example: “Hi. I am exporting/copying an h264 video, and I don’t understand anything about video codecs… and I want to know where to set the quality level in order to virtually guaranty that I won’t lose any quality, because it’s the last known video of my deceased grandmother’s dying words and I want to archive it.” – “Cool. Set it to 20.” / “Hi, I want to edit the output into a feature film and be taken seriously.” “Cool. Stop using the h264 codec. Move to proresHQ. Or at the very least jump to h265 if you’re on a PC and Prores doesn’t seem accesable to you.”

thank you, that was really helpful! ill play around with it and see what works for me. :wink:

It honestly depends on what you want, really. Many people (like yours truly) want to output to an intermediate format (like ProRes 422 HQ), and then use their own method for the final stage (x265, in my case). If you want a final output format, just use H265.

N.B. Your RTX 3080 should be recognized and be used.