No problem, the more the merrier.Well that was interesting. RickMen -- Trevor kindly provided me with the link to your sample. I hope you don't mind, but it allows us to experiment and perhaps produce other results.
The first was to render Same As Project Settings, and to leave both SmartRender and Hardware Acceleration ticked. Rendering was thus quite quick. It took just over 20 seconds to render your 7 second video clip. You might imagine my surprise, though, when the new file had mostly the same properties as both the original and Project Settings, However, the bitrate was drastically different, but in the opposite direction to what Trevor got. In this case it showed as 204606 kbps i.e. double the amount you were after. Playback of the new video was absolutely smooth, with the same chatty audio in the background sounding exactly the same as the original. The quality of the new video was no better than the original, though was certainly as good.
I never knew VS had a upscaling featureI then rendered with SmartRender disabled but Hardware Acceleration enabled. Rendering time remained at about 20 seconds. This time the bitrate went back to 204606 kbps. Quality remained unchanged.
What this does prove is that the hardware encoder acceleration feature is still immature (buggy). It was buggy in VS2018 and remains so in VS2022. Hopefully when I upgrade again in 5-7 years Corel will have addressed itIn other words, my results are quite different to Trevor's. The frame speed of 25 fps didn't appear to degrade anything, and the minimum bitrate in all of these experiments were either 99998 kbps or just over double that. Hardware acceleration seemed to be option which favoured a much better bitrate reading. But not unexpectedly, that higher bitrate resulted in the new video being around twice the size of the original (188 MB vs. 93 MB for the original in both cases where Acceleration was used). Where Acceleration was not used, 86.1 MB was the same size in both i.e. a minor reduction in size from the original. As already noted, but worth repeating, quality remained visually the same regardless of what options were chosen. Rendering time also remained the same (around 20 seconds for a 7 second video) whether or not Smart Render or Acceleration or both were enabled or disabled. All of the above property readings initially came from VideoStudio itself, though were confirmed in MediaInfo.
It's virtually impossible, however, to account for these different results between the three of us, though clearly the fact that our computers have different architecture must account for a large part of it. As you will see from my system specs under my avatar, I have opted for an all AMD machine, in both graphics and motherboard, and thus have selected AMD for hardware acceleration...
. In the meantime I'm just going to stick with the settings that give me the highest quality in terms of bit rate (Smart Render On and HW Encoder Acceleration OFF) and live with the slower render times.Thanks gentlemen for your assistance.