Please confirm my understanding of x264 encoding settings

[manono]

And you're still full of it.

I don't wish to go 12 rounds with anyone...

I'm not so sure of that. I'm beginning to suspect that was the plan from the beginning.

Truly disgraceful and shameful, monetizing public domain films and songs...

I can't tell if you're really as ignorant and clueless as you seem or if this is just a not-so-clever trolling attempt. In any event, we're no longer addressing the original thread topic, so bye.

[hello_hello]

Gordian knot allows me to choose a bit rate and let the software determine the file size, and doing this GK also allows 2-pass encoding. From your responses this is the wrong way to do it and is probably due to the software being so old. I will start looking into newer software as suggested.

To run a 2 pass encode you've got to be able to specify a bitrate or file size in one form or another.
For MeGUI you can specify it in the x264 encoder configuration, but I find mostly it's easier not to. You can leave the encoder configured for single pass, CRF encoding, and use MeGUI's AutoEncode function (you can re-encode the video and audio separately and combine them into a single file yourself, or AutoEncode will do it for you). AutoEncode lets you specify a file size or bitrate. If you do, MeGUI will automatically switch to 2 pass encoding for you. The file size you specify includes any audio and container overhead etc, so MeGUI will work out the required video bitrate. If you specify a bitrate in AutoEncode, I think MeGUI extracts the audio bitrate from that and uses what's left for the video. Something along those lines. I mostly use CRF encoding myself.
Or you can specify a bitrate in the x264 encoder configuration if you want to do it that way..

One thing I liked about GK is that it calculated an "aspect error" when cropping the black bars, so I could then adjust the cropping to minimise the error. I haven't seen this (yet) in other software but I could still keep GK just to determine appropriate cropping to apply to the newer software.

There's a few aspect ratio calculators to be found on the internet. Or try this one. It's an exe, but it's safe.
YodaResizeCalculator
MeGUI has a similar calculator built into it's Avisynth script creator.

For ITU resizing of DVDs (if you're using ITU) the calculators often tend not to exactly agree by default as they're based on different pixel aspect ratios.
There's a list of the commonly used pixel aspect ratios here:
https://www.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1058927#post1058927
MeGUI still uses the second ones for ITU: "Almost exact and commonly used ITU-PAR", as I'm pretty sure Gordian Knot does, or you can set custom aspect ratios with either program. Some programs such as Handbrake and Staxrip use the "MPEG-4 PAR".
The creator of the calculator I linked to did it slightly differently, but none of it really matters. When cropping and resizing ITU DVDs they only vary by a pixel or two, and for non-ITU sources or when resizing square pixel video they should all agree.

[newpball]

I suppose I'm what might loosely be termed as a 'professional' since many of the videos I encode using CRF settings are for being monetized on YouTube. I encode them that way after taking lousy tape and DVD sources and doing what I can to improve them before then making MP4s for YouTube and DVDs for myself and others.

What's the name of your channel manono?