"ColorYUV (Analyze = True) hmmm, so you have seen "luma" changes yourself? and it's because of the resize? and there's nothing i can do about it? im doing an encode right now without a resize to check. and about the bitrate, the math makes sense, but are you saying im basically wasting space and gaining no quality? once you go past that .4444 (with the 5\% buffer) there will be no gain no matter what? so let me put this another term just to get the mechanism behind it the 1080p will have larger pictures, but they will be lower quality, because it needs more bits per frame (due to res) while the 720p frames need less bits because they are smaller."