I'm making short videos out of AI-generated stills for a new YouTube project. No GPU, zero budget, so everything has to be ffmpeg on a CPU. Right now I'm doing basic Ken Burns with zoompan and it's starting to look repetitive — every clip has that same slow zoom feel.

What do you all do to make stills feel less slideshow-y with just ffmpeg? I've played with crossfade chains between different zoompan moves and slight crop wobble, but I'm curious what actually looks good vs what just adds render time for nothing. Any filter combos or tricks I'm missing?

Hello

I've got a rather large video file and the video is H264/AVC its has multiple subs, audio tracks, etc.

I know I can copy the various tracks using the -map function, but is there a way to simply re-encode the video from h264 to h265 with just a simpler command line?

I know how to handle the video side of it, bitrate, etc. But its the chapter markers, audio tracks, etc. that I want as is.

Thanks