diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 5197f80..afa4c71 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -7,12 +7,71 @@
 ![Coverage](https://img.shields.io/badge/coverage-97%25-brightgreen?logo=codecov)
 ![Python](https://img.shields.io/badge/python->=3.10-blue?logo=python)
 
+This project is used to encode behavior videos and, depending on the user
+request, will compress those videos while ensuring that they are formatted for
+correct display across many devices. This may include performing common image
+pre-processing steps that are common across many commercial video products, but
+have to be done post-hoc for our behavior videos.
 
+## Goals
+
+This will attempt to compress videos so that the results:
+
+* Retain the majority of the detail of the input video
+* Take up as little space as possible for a target amount of visual detail
+* Are in a format that can be widely viewed across devices, and streamed by
+  browsers
+* Have pixel data in a color space that most players can properly display
+
+This video compression is often lossy, and the original videos are not kept, so
+this library will attempt to perform the highest-quality video compression once.
+The _speed_ of this compression is strictly secondary to the _quality_ of the
+compression, as measured by the visual detail retained and the compression
+ratio. See
+[this section](#brief-benchmarks-on-video-compression-with-cpu-based-encoders-and-gpu-based-encoders)
+for more details.
+
+
+Additionally, this package should provide an easy to use interface that:
+
+* Presents users with a curated set of compression settings, which have been
+  rigorously tested
+* Allow users to also provide their own compression settings, if they have
+  specific requirements
+
+## Non-goals
+
+* Spending as little time and compute resources as possible to transform videos,
+  at the expense of compression quality.
 
 ## Usage
  - The BehaviorVideoJob.run_job method in the transform_videos should be the primary method to call for processing video files.
  - On a merge to main, this package will be published as a singularity container, which can easily be run on a SLURM cluster.
 
+## Brief benchmarks on video compression with CPU-based encoders and GPU-based encoders
+
+A perhaps surprising fact is that video encoders implementing the same algorithm
+written for different compute resources
+_do not have the same visual performance_, in that for a given compression ratio
+they do not retain the same amount of visual detail.
+
+This can be seen in the plot below, where the GPU encoder and CPU encoders
+retain different amounts of visual detail, as assessed with VMAF.
+
+![visual performance vs compress ratio](/assets/compression-vs-quality.png)
+
+This also shows that different presets of the same encoder, like _CPU Slow_ and
+_CPU Fast_, also have different performance. For comrpession ratios greater than
+100, it often makes sense to take your time and use a slow preset of a CPU-based
+encoder to retain as much visual information for a given amount of compression.
+
+While it may be tempting to select a faster preset, or faster compute resource
+like GPU for dramatic speedups shown below, the lossy compression and intent to
+delete the original means that taking time to do it right once might well be
+worth it.
+
+![throughput vs compress ratio](/assets/compression-vs-speed.png)
+
 ## Development
 
 To develop the code, run
@@ -84,10 +143,10 @@ The table below, from [semantic release](https://github.com/semantic-release/sem
 ### Documentation
 To generate the rst files source files for documentation, run
 ```bash
-sphinx-apidoc -o doc_template/source/ src 
+sphinx-apidoc -o doc_template/source/ src
 ```
 Then to create the documentation HTML files, run
 ```bash
 sphinx-build -b html doc_template/source/ doc_template/build/html
 ```
-More info on sphinx installation can be found [here](https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/installation.html).
+    More info on sphinx installation can be found [here](https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/installation.html).
diff --git a/assets/compression-vs-quality.png b/assets/compression-vs-quality.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f491bc7
Binary files /dev/null and b/assets/compression-vs-quality.png differ
diff --git a/assets/compression-vs-speed.png b/assets/compression-vs-speed.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e4177c6
Binary files /dev/null and b/assets/compression-vs-speed.png differ