Fastest cleanest way to recompress video to be smaller?

[nerys]

I am looking for a fast clean easy drag and drop dead simple. Drop video click go solution for making a big file into a small file.

I could not find my camcorder last night (it makes nice tight 720p files that are good enough without being HUGE) so I had to use my 5dMKII

and holy crap did it make some big files. great quality for sure but I simply do not need that kind of quality for this subject matter. 22 hours later and I am murdering the hotel wifi hehe

I found the camcorder (phewww) but is there a good solution for taking the insane 1080p files the canon makes and rapidly and easily simply recompressing them to lower quality 720p files.

I am using mpeg stream clip now and it both seems to be working and is working pretty fast too (pretty decent I7 laptop with k4000 video 4gb HP Elitebook 8770w)

any suggestions? I would also love a replacement for mpeg stream clip as it "works" on my 4k flight videos (yeah huge files but thats ok when you want quality and the clips are 10 to 30 seconds

mpeg stream clip DOES let me cut them but not "see" them (lumix) I have to know in advance what time index locations I want to be my start and finish and do it "blind" though it does munge the files once in a while or just pukes and won't touch a file. it also have a big problem letting me "merge" files. I either lose audio sync or lose audio all together and other programs have trouble dealing with the resulting file (understandable I am surprised it will even touch my 4k files)

is there something better/newer/more compatible? drag and drop simple UI pick start pick end cut the file without recompressing and let me merge resulting clips into one file etc..

any help is greatly appreciated!

[redwudz]

Maybe VidCoder if you just want to re-encode. Make a preset for your desired output format/specification, then drag and drop or batch. I use it to re-encode my HD .mov files from one of my cameras and .mts files from another.
The speed of encoding for most any program depends on the encoder settings, not so much the program itself.

For editing, try AVIDemux. It can also encode if desired.

[pandy]

More details needed... H.265 may be to slow unless you will go for QSV HW encoder and H.264 4k is not compatible with most of HW decoders (very limited HW solutions support HP wit level higher than 4.2).
ffmpeg should be OK for transcoding.