Perhaps I didn’t explain it too clearly and, BTW, it was all clarified by my subsequent post in reply to Mighty777 which, perhaps, you haven’t read. I was NOT trying to increase the (original) bit rate of a H.264 file: I wanted to PRESERVE, as much as possible, its bit-rate (well, the original clips’ bit rate, before any editing takes place) when exporting, thus preserving the original material quality, given the fact that at the time I wasn’t aware that it was possible, when exporting, to use, in my nle sw, CUSTOM settings, by manually modifying them (namely average and max VBR values, for peaks, along with constant/variable bit rate mode, GOP length & structure etc) instead of just those DEFAULT settings (and others) proposed in the dialog window when I select MP4 export mode. So far, as a matter of facts, I haven’t been saving any of my videos in that AVI mode, for obvious reasons. The experiment had only been carried out to find out what result it would have produced, no more than that. As I am pretty new to this stuff and, particularly, all the technicalities behind it, it’s obvious that I am asking here for advice as many others will do. It’s called LEARNING curve
and, BTW, this is a general matter that thousands of people have been asking for or posting questions about on several forums. Just as an example:
https://vimeo.com/forums/topic:33517 . My question was exactly the same as the one asked for in that topic.
Before using custom settings and working out how to achieve them, and without getting errors during the rendering process (it happened!), I could only get final encoded files that had a significant drop off, as far as overall video’s bit rate goes, with respect to the clips’ original video quality. That led me to the initial question: “why shoot at 100Mb/s....”.
Now with some more experiments and testing (I primarily work on 4K material) I normally choose, along with higher bit rate values, a HIGH export profile (level 4.2) and BEST coding quality. And the videos look way better than before. Will obviously have to do more testing on that and try other (different) settings and see what the final result is going to be, given that I have no way to know what happens next, i.e. once the video is uploaded to YT, for instance, as it has its own compression/re-encoding techniques, or indeed any other platform.
To use the same words used by Aaron in the post linked above: “Hopefully I can find some wide range VBR settings that allow me to get maximum quality in complex scenes with a bit smaller file size that a full high bit rate encode.”
