Greetings,

My goal is to be able to create a 30 minute video with the following specs:

.MP4, H.264, UHD (3840x2160), 23.976fps 

and get it to be a "reasonably" smaller file than the total 31 GB of raw footage.

I mainly wondering, can anyone suggest a better (more efficient) transcode codec to use for my raw footage, and is there a quicker (more effiicient) way to get to the final H.264, .MP4 file? I'm also totally open to any recommendations for compressing my final UHD H.264, .MP4 file, if that is something I should consider.

Much thanks!! for any help on this :)

Here's what I ended up doing:

1. I shot about 45 minutes of 23.976 fps footage using a UHD (3840x2160) codec with the following specs: .Mov, 4:2:0 8-bit, H.264 100Mbps. The total size of all of the 45 minute footage is almost 31 GB

2. I made my sequence using the linked files, then transcoded the sequence (linked media with handles) to DNxHR HQ (8bit), which according to the Avid codec bitrate specs is 711 Mbps (88.88MB/s x 8bits), and has a compression ratio of 4.5:1.

3. Exporting a final cut 30 minute sequence in DNxHR HQ gave me a total file size of 148 GB, way larger than the original 45 minute footage.

4. I then tried exporting the final 30 minute sequence as DNxHR SQ (8bit), which according to the Avid codec bitrate specs is also 711 Mbps (88.88MB/s x 8bits), and has a compression ratio of 7:1.

5. This gave me a 30 minute file total file size of  98 GB, still way larger than the 30GB of the 45 minutes raw footage.

6. I then took the DNxHR SQ file and exported an H.264 .MP4 file in Adobe Media Encoder, using the Youtube suggested bitrate of 35Mbps for 2160p (UHD) files, and this file came out to 7.5 GB

Did you try doing an H264 direct out of Media composer?