After this chat, I'll refine a little bit further:

chatgpt.com/share/688f38...

So many resources out there just blindly recommend ProRes or similar! Neglecting the absurd storage requirements for amateurs. Often giving false advice that h265 is too demanding for your machine. With HW support I found that to be untrue.

I also found it interesting that the preset defaulted to Faster for me. That relates to the effort during encoding. Medium seems to be a better compromise:

x265.readthedocs.io/en/master/pr...

So, I guess these are my hobbyist compromise settings. I'll use them for very roughly pre-color-corrected footage that my fellow hobbyists will use for editing.

And no, ProRes is not viable due to storage space ;)

Sucking up to him also does not cause him to be a reliable negotiation partner.

But yeah, alienating him might be worse.