Editing video - file sizes are too big?

[jrodefeld]

I'm having a dilemma I'm hoping someone can help me out with.

I subscribe to a variety of online classes where the content is video-based. What I'd like to do is download the videos and re-edit some of them to highlight important lessons. A lot of the videos are freeform discussions of many different topics and it can be hard to go back and find where certain critical points are mentioned.

I have no trouble downloading the videos, I found an effective Chrome extension that handles this for me no problem.

The problem I'm having is that I can't seem to export the video after I edit it in anything approaching decent quality without the file size being many, many times larger than the original video I downloaded.

Many of the videos I downloaded are between 30 minutes and 1 hour.

A typical resolution and frame rate is: 1920x970 at 25fps

The file size of an hour long video at the above resolution is usually around 250mb.

The video generally looks crystal clear. When I click on "Properties" it tells me that data rate for the video is only 392kbps.

If I re-encode this video, I can't achieve anything decent unless I encode at a bitrate of 8mbps or higher with a resulting file size of 1.5gb or so.

Is there any way I can re-edit these videos and achieve similar video quality with similar file sizes? Any particular codec or encoding settings I should look for?

Thanks!

[ProWo]

1920x970 1 hour 250Mb with perfect quality seems not possible.
could you post a mediainfo report (text mode) from this file here?

[jagabo]

1920x970 1 hour 250Mb with perfect quality seems not possible.

It's possible with video that's rather static. For example a screen cap where the screen isn't changing most of the time.

Use x264 or x265, maybe with stillimage tuning.