Suggestion - Save the preview render, change preview render settings
Hi there!
This is a concept that came to the front while discussing the long render times usual with videos, especially large projects with deep effects stacks.
The preview render already does most of what is needed, but does not quite go far enough. It lacks in two important ways: You don't have the ability to save the preview render, and you can't specify it's quality settings easily.
It would be a killer feature to be able to set the preview render quality to the final output quality, and then have the ability to save that preview render as an output file.
On a huge project one can turn this on when you have finished the cut selection and color grading stuff. While you are still messing with putting the finishing touches on the video, you are already rendering the final video. Even though it is rendered in chunks, I do think ffmpeg has the ability to stitch those chunks together with very little overhead if the video stream is just copied.
Something to think about.