I needed to use Shotcut to add one image I forgot to ask him to do - how do I export and not lose any of the quality? My first exports were like 218mb files and even though I couldn’t tell a quality difference, I assume there is one.
And now I’m doing exports changing Format to mov, also in Codec changed Quality to 100%. It gives me a file size of 6.01 GB, but I don’t know if making it 3 times bigger is actually better. Any advice?
Someone with more expertise on this particular subject matter might be able to help more than me.
However, your screenshot probably has enough information to get really close to the original. As you discovered, by setting quality at 100%, that results in a much larger file. That also means the file you received already has some compression (which is normal). You could attempt to duplicate the video and audio bitrates by going to:
export → advanced → codec
Make sure the codec is libx264.
Select rate control and adjust to 25M (you could experiment with this number and try typing 27M, which is pretty close to the 28350 listed but the 25M preset should be more than sufficient). You could also enable dual pass.
Then go to the audio tab and adjust bitrate to 120kbps.
Having said all that, I like the crf option set at around 67% which is visually lossless, and gives reasonable file sizes while maintaining excellent quality. That can be done by selecting quality based vbr under the codec tab and then adjusting the percentage to 67 (crf 17).
