I would like to see a numerical slider for Export Settings Quality Level. I find the “Low, Medium, High” aren’t versatile enough.
I restore old videos which I first work on in Premiere Pro. They’re usually a couple of generations removed from the original, i.e., 8 mm → VHS → DVD, so they have quite a low bitrate to begin with. I find after setting a very conservative bitrate in Premiere Pro, let’s say 1.25–2.00 Mbps, I scale them in TVAI and I select the Quality Level Low. But it’s always a bit too high, typically a variable bit rate of around 3 Mbps for an MP4. I use MediaInfo to view the file’s Metadata. I then re-encode the movies using Media Encoder and set the bitrate to 1.25 Mbps.
Uploading the movies to Frame.IO and using the comparison view, I cannot tell the difference between the two movies, even using frame by frame to view. For my typical 10-minute movies, the difference is nearly 50% size of the movie file.
Basically, it just adds one more step to the process where I have to re-encode the TVAI MP4 to get the desired movie size.
Agree!!! I’m currently digitizing and upscaling all of my DVDs to 4x size. I’m consistently finding the medium quality setting of my enlarged and upscaled files is too small with a bit rate around 10,000 kpbs which is close to the original DVD rip at 9,800 kpbs. When I choose the “High” quality setting the files balloon to around 49,000 kpbs, which is way to high and the files are way to big for my purposes. This leaves me with no alternative but to choose the “High” setting, and then run all of my files through a second piece of software to reduce the file to something more like 20,000 kpbs. Roughly half way between Medium and High. Really annoying to have to waste another 90 minutes per file and compress each again.
