Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos. A man can only read "Use Handbrake to convert your mkv to an mp4 :)" so many times before losing it, so I am writing this article to channel the resulting psychic damage into something productive.
If you are new to working with videos (or, let's face it, even if you aren't), please read through this guide to avoid making mistakes that can cost you lots of computing power, storage space, or video quality.