This is not reality: > AV1 encodings can often be 4x smaller than an equivalent x264 encoding and half the size of an x265 encoding. I have spent a LOT of tim

This is not reality: > AV1 encodings can often be 4x smaller than an equivalent x264 encoding and half the size of an x265 encoding. I have spent a LOT of time with av1 in the past four years. More realistically you can be about 80% of the bitrate of a properly encoded x265 (HEVC) file at about the same quality. Or the same bitrate as the same length of x265 file at probably 10-15% VMAF quality gain. AV1 is not some magical thing that will let you encode the same 1920x1080 24 fps movie into something 4x smaller at the same human perceived quality level. You are also not going to have half the bitrate of a x265 (HEVC) file just because it's AV1 and be the same perceptual quality. Particularly in anything with fast motion. You can test this for yourself by taking a lossless yuv420 raw file, encoding the same 5 minute test clip into av1 at 2500 kbps average and x265 at 5000 kbps average, then dumping the resulting encodes to two separate yuv420 y4m files (uncompressed) and comparing them with VMAF. It's great, but it's not THAT great.