90 min game play recording doubled in size compared to previous 90 minutes?

[Lakestk]

hi am new to all this, but i dont think it is normal for 2 gameplay videos to have such a big difference in file size?

was recording gameplay close to 90 minutes in length which ended up being 53gb.
the next 85 minutes without any setting changes ended up being 115gb in size.

can i have these file sizes way smaller without much loss in quality?

my recordings seem to be random did many 2 second tests a moment ago and 2 seconds were 600kb~ filze or 1.5mb~ ish in size.

 

[koala]

You're using rate control CQP, this is variable bitrate. It adapts to motion. For low motion or still images, less bandwidth (disk space) is required. A completely still image needs no disk space at all. If half of your smaller recording only contains the game character selection screen or game menu without motion, it will explain the disk space difference.

The quality of the CQP mode is expressed with the CQ value. Range 0-50. The lower the value the higher the quality and the higher the disk space requirement. A change of +3/-3 about halves/doubles disk space requirement. 15 is very low and wasteful, 18 is still considered "indistinguishable from the original", 23 is "medium quality" (very small compression artifacts visible), around 30 is approximately streaming quality with very visible compression artifacts, unsuitable for archiving and postprocessing.