I’m currently exporting a 5 hour project. The ETA was about 5h but I think it’s too risky to have it export it all in one go, maybe power cuts out, or windows decides to force restart for an update, stuff happens.
So I’m using markers to export 30 minutes pieces.
But I think it would be helpful to have an option to do this automatically instead of me manually creating individual markers to export the pieces. I’m also not sure if the markers are inclusive on both ends so I might have some duplicated frames (not a really big deal, but the time savings and consistency would be great).
You mean export sections? This is basically just choosing a section to export, it’s in basically softwares like vegas, and work similarly, however it always stays there. Honestly shotcut’s way is much better in my opinion. (Except the export part where you have to change few settings, but you can export directly in Vegas)
I basically mean like instead of exporting the entire timeline in one go, Shotcut can automatically make 5 smaller equal length export jobs so in case something crashes at 99%, not everything is lost.
I don’t see it in any other softwares, but it is like cloud rendering, where you render in chunks, I have seen that in blender.
It is honestly a nice addition, and I also have previously made a local cloud rendering suggestion here. It basically does the chunk rendering over different computers, but also being able to do it on a single computer one by one is good.
I think it’s a good idea. Personally I don’t put long edits on one timeline. I create multiple chapters and render them individually. It also makes it easier for me to make tweaks and edits to just a part of the video without having re-render the whole thing again. Once I’m happy with all the individual parts of my video, I use the concatenate function of ffmpeg to combine them all together into one long file.
FFmpeg concat is both faster and better (usually).
It is faster because no re-encoding is done. It literally jams the stream data of the chapters back-to-back on disk and rewrites the MP4 or whatever container to span all the stitched chapters. The bottleneck is the speed of the hard drive rather than the CPU, since the CPU does virtually nothing but help copy existing data.
Also because no re-encoding is taking place, the final quality is (usually) better. Putting previously-exported chapters in Shotcut and exporting a final long video would be another generation of encoding which causes more quality loss… unless lossless files are used through the whole chain, which few people probably do.
With concat, each chapter can be exported at final quality settings, then be stitched together verbatim into the final long video. Like @bentacular said, if there are problems that require a fix in editing, slow high-quality encoding only has to be done on the chapters with problems, then stitch it all back together again. It is not necessary to bring all chapters back into Shotcut and slowly export the entire video again for every edit fix.
EDIT: Granted, there is no generation loss if using the “Import MLT XML As Clip” feature to add the chapters to a final timeline. However, the final timeline needs to be rebuilt or adjusted every time the length of a chapter MLT changes (which is easily forgotten or skipped). And, the full length has to be exported to apply any edit fixes, rather than exporting only the chapter with problems.