Thanks very much for that. I know that Adobe is balls for h264 encoding, so I did indeed export losslessly. And then I used a different piece of software to encode h264. Not sure if x264 will be better or not. But I suspect that either way, I need to go much higher with my bitrate max given your settings. I was just wary of such a wide gap between average and max, realizing that it means some parts will then be quite low bitrate depending on how often 25Mbps is approached. So I settled for CBR 18.

Perhaps I will give it a try with target 18Mbps, max 25. Honestly, for my own copy, I’ll just do max CBR and burn it to BD50 for peace of mind. But that’s an unreasonable thing to upload for something like this.