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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • 2 pass will encode a file once, and store a log of information about what it did… then on the 2nd pass it’ll use that information to better know when it should use more or less bitrate/keyframes - honestly i’m not too sure of the specifics here

    now, it’s most often used to keep a file to a particular file size rather than increasing quality per se, but id say keeping a file to a particular size means you’re using the space that you have effectively

    looks like with ffmpeg you do need to run it twice - there’s a log option

    i mostly export from davinci resolve so i’m not too well versed in ffmpeg flags etc

    doing a little more reading it seems the consensus is that spending more time on encoding (ie a higher preset) will likely give a better outcome than 2 pass unless you REALLY care about file size (like the file MUST be less than, but as close to 100mb)


  • if you’re planning on editing it, you can record in a very high bitrate and re-encode after the fact… yes, re-encoding looses some quality, however you’re likely to end up with a far better video if you record and 2x the h264 bitrate and then re-encode to your final h265 (or av1) bitrate than if you just record straight to h264 at your final bitrate

    another note on this: lots of streaming stuff will say to use CBR (constant bitrate), which is true for streaming, however i think probably for re-encode VBR (variable bitrate) with multi-pass encode will give a good trade-off - CBR for live because the encoding software can’t predict what’s coming up, but when you have a known video it can change bitrate up and down because it knows when it’ll need higher bitrate