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Why does MP4 get bigger after conversion?


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I had a film on a DVD I converted to MP4 with Movavi. It came out as 156mb. I imported the 156mb file to Movie Maker and added a title. When I export as MP4 the 156mb ends up as a 634mb file. Why?? Title is only a few mb and is not the issue. I am working with plain MP4, nothing HD.

Thanks

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The MPEG-4 codec supports a huge range of pixel formats and bit rates; it's quite possible to inflate a file with the right (wrong) settings.

I'd try to avoid so many conversions; see if you can get the DVD to an uncompressed AVI or Quicktime movie, do your work on it, and then play with the compression settings on output until you arrive at a quality-filesize compromise you can live with.

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So all codec's (Mpeg 4 being one of them) have pretty much an infinite amount of adjustment settings. 

Long GOP pattern and frequency. Frame rate and frame size. Bit rate (variable, or maximum). Then you have options for single or multiple pass, audio sample rate, bit depth and bit rate. 

So if you just hit the "export" button without making any adjustments, you're relying on the software to do set all those parameters. So of course, two different programs are going to set widely alternative parameters from one another. 

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