user16891: Considering that I'm not a professional editor and only record some random skateboard, snowboard or just some travel footage around with my GoPro Session 4, is re-encoding to H.265 to save storage space a good idea? 
What possible drawback could I expect if I wanted to edit with these files after the re-encoding?

user4169: Only you can answer if it is worth it, because nobody else understands the economics of your project. Like how much video you have, and how important quality it. Hard drives are cheep, unless you have thousands of hours of video. Video compression isn't lossless, meaning you will never get a higher quality recording than you have now. Every time you recompress it, it will get a litte worse. So unless your hard drive budget is too high, why accept an extra qenerational loss?

user14523: If your only goal is to save storage space and you never plan on editing or re-encoding the files again, you probably won't notice any change in quality.
However, if you plan to edit or re-encode to another format in the future, I'd strongly recommend against re-encoding to H.265 now. Every time you decode and re-encode video to the same or a different codec, especially highly compressed codecs like H.264 and H.265, you lose quality. With these highly compressed codecs, the generational loss and concatenation artifacts become noticeable to the average viewer in as little as one codec cycle.

16891: <p>Considering that I'm not a professional editor and only record some random skateboard, snowboard or just some travel footage around with my GoPro Session 4, is re-encoding to H.265 to save storage space a good idea? </p>

<p>What possible drawback could I expect if I wanted to edit with these files after the re-encoding?</p>
 4169: <p>Only you can answer if it is worth it, because nobody else understands the economics of your project. Like how much video you have, and how important quality it. Hard drives are cheep, unless you have thousands of hours of video. Video compression isn't lossless, meaning you will never get a higher quality recording than you have now. Every time you recompress it, it will get a litte worse. So unless your hard drive budget is too high, why accept an extra qenerational loss?</p>
 14523: <p>If your only goal is to save storage space and you never plan on editing or re-encoding the files again, you probably won't notice any change in quality.</p>

<p>However, if you plan to edit or re-encode to another format in the future, I'd strongly recommend against re-encoding to H.265 now. Every time you decode and re-encode video to the same or a different codec, especially highly compressed codecs like H.264 and H.265, you lose quality. With these highly compressed codecs, the generational loss and concatenation artifacts become noticeable to the average viewer in as little as one codec cycle.</p>
