Video compression with handbrake-cli
You never even touched upon the "video" tab ... where all the most important HandBrake options for video optimization and filesize reduction are (although, I realize it might seem a little intimidating if you don't know what they do). Perhaps I could help.
Your reduced ~500Mb export could have easily been reduced further to around ~200Mb just from experimenting with the video export options on that tab. Meaning, your average 1 hour upload time could be slashed again in half without any apparent loss in quality. If you're uploading regularly, this could be a real time-saver for you, since once you've found the right optimization, you can save the settings to a preset, which you can just select for all subsequent transcodes.
I've been using HandBrake for many years now. The best version to use is "HandBrake Nightly" as it's their most optimized and up-to-date build: Just Google: "HandBrake Nightly" for the official download website
Once you find your perf