@nprofile1q... Ah cool! Yeah, that's always the trade-off isn't it. My own use case leans quantity over quality, but if you make videos for redistribution then maybe you actually want slower encoding for a better quality ratio.

Here's my full conversion script btw: https://stuff.jfietkau.me/toav1

In my experience, reencoding old H264 videos to equivalent-ish AV1 is still vastly cheaper than buying additional storage. Running that script for a week or so got me nearly a TB back.