First thing you need to know is that as soon as you re-encode something, you'll lose quality, that's unavoidable(unless you use a lossless format, but those make HUGE files that will be bigger than your source so they're not worth mentioning for this).
The resulting quality of an encodes depends on the settings you select for said encode. In software like Any video converter, that's decided with the profile you choose and they'll often try to make them go fast since that's what people want, but fast in the encoding world is almost always synonymous with low quality. There's no easy answer, and with a software like that, it's probably an impossible goal unless you can edit the profiles yourself, but that would require quite a bit of knowledge to modify the settings properly assuming it allows you to do it.
The trick is to find settings that will do what you want without the resulting encode having a noticeable drop in quality. The script I made above is so that I could easily reduce the file size of videos that were too big for their quality level using settings that works well most of the time.
Getting that big a reduction like you're trying to achieve is probably too ambitious of a goal without having a noticeable drop in quality, but depending on the source, reducing the file size to half of it could be realistic and is often the case when I use it.
My suggestion would be to use the script I made since it's the easiest way to get a smaller file and keeping the quality high and to modify the following line:
to this(which I think I left commented above the previous one since it's what I use):
and if the filesize is still too big for you, you can modify 21 to something slightly higher(you can use decimal point numbers) which will reduce quality, but also the file size. I personally wouldn't go higher than 23 or 24 since you'll really start to see the quality decline around there. HD sources can be more forgiving though.
Be warned that it will be very slow though(as the preset names says), but there's no way around that if you want to keep the quality as high as possible.
The resulting quality of an encodes depends on the settings you select for said encode. In software like Any video converter, that's decided with the profile you choose and they'll often try to make them go fast since that's what people want, but fast in the encoding world is almost always synonymous with low quality. There's no easy answer, and with a software like that, it's probably an impossible goal unless you can edit the profiles yourself, but that would require quite a bit of knowledge to modify the settings properly assuming it allows you to do it.
The trick is to find settings that will do what you want without the resulting encode having a noticeable drop in quality. The script I made above is so that I could easily reduce the file size of videos that were too big for their quality level using settings that works well most of the time.
Getting that big a reduction like you're trying to achieve is probably too ambitious of a goal without having a noticeable drop in quality, but depending on the source, reducing the file size to half of it could be realistic and is often the case when I use it.
My suggestion would be to use the script I made since it's the easiest way to get a smaller file and keeping the quality high and to modify the following line:
Code:
SET x264param=--preset slower --crf 21 --deblock -1:-1 --psy-rd 1.0:0.10
Code:
SET x264param=--preset veryslow --crf 21 --deblock -1:-1 --psy-rd 1.0:0.10
and if the filesize is still too big for you, you can modify 21 to something slightly higher(you can use decimal point numbers) which will reduce quality, but also the file size. I personally wouldn't go higher than 23 or 24 since you'll really start to see the quality decline around there. HD sources can be more forgiving though.
Be warned that it will be very slow though(as the preset names says), but there's no way around that if you want to keep the quality as high as possible.
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