[Gilles Gagnon] "I was wondering if I can lower the bitrate while maintaining quality but reducing file size."
You sure can. When I deliver my
Boris TV episodes to BorisFX, I use 3Mbps average with a 6Mbps peak and the files are small with high quality. It really depends on the content of the video. A lot of fast changing scenes will require more bits to encode. You really have to go by the content. I would try 3 or 4Mbps average with 6 or 8Mbps peak and see how it looks.
The file size is controlled by the average. The lower you make the average bitrate, the smaller the file. If you want higher quality from the same bitrate use
Two Pass encoding. This will allow the encoder to make better use of the bits it has but will take twice as long to encode because it uses two passes through the video; one to determine the optimal bitrate for each frame and another to actually encode at those bitrates.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com 
