Hey guys. This is my first time posting here. I’d like to make it very clear that I am brand new at editing, shotcut, everything when it comes to making videos. I recently started learning some basic video editing for my youtube channel. So far so good, I only need shotcut for some basic stuff so it’s great! Fade in/out, some text here and there, really basic things.
But I’ve noticed something and I have no idea what I’m doing wrong. I’m using the default youtube export (just click youtube preset and then export basically), and I’ve noticed that the size of the exported video, no matter the size, becomes around triple the size. Just now I had a 2.58gb video (downloaded a stream I did on twitch). Original video was 1 hour and 54 minutes. I cut OUT parts of the original file (now making it 1hr 45 mins), applied a gain filter to increase the overall volume, placed a fade in/out at the beginning and end of the video, and now the exported file is 9.08gb. Can anybody assist me with providing some basic settings that I could check? I don’t know what I’ve done wrong and 9gb feels like something is wrong considering I even cut big chunks of the original video out. I repeat I am extremely new at this so please bear with me. Are there any settings that I need to double check are ticked on/off? I have a decent nvidia card (gtx 1070) if that makes any difference to the settings.
It is only wrong if you can not meet your goals with the file. Is 9 GB a problem for you? How does the quality look. If the quality looks good, and you are able to use the file, then there is no problem.
The final file size is a result of many parameters - including the video mode and the quality/bitrate of the export. If you want the file to be smaller, you can reduce the image resolution in the video mode, or reduce the quality setting in the advanced export panel.
But like I said, if the file works for you, don’t change anything.
Hi, thank you for responding. 9gb is a problem for me in that I’m aiming for something slightly smaller in order to be able to upload the videos in a timely fashion (my internet is not ideal for uploading very large files).
I would like the resolution to stay the same (1080p on youtube), and still retain a decent quality. But could you please answer my question about the settings? Why is the export three times larger when the length of the video is shorter and the edits I’ve done minimal? I repeat I am not familiar with any of this so things such as bitrate go a bit over my head.
Hi, thank you for answering. No I have not tried to convert the footage to edit-friendly, I don’t know how to and I cannot find that option anywhere. My streaming setup is to have it fixed to 30fps, I don’t know if that changes anything (streamlabs settings) .
Your question is unclear to me. The default YouTube preset is optimized to make a file that is most compatible with the YouTube recommendations. You can reduce the quality to make it smaller, but that might affect the quality of your resulting youtube video.
Allow me to rephrase my question then if that helps:
Are there any settings that I should look into/change if I want the size of the exported video to be as close to the original video’s as possible, and notincrease in size exponentially? Does using the hardware encoder for example increase the resulting exported size of the file? Thank you.
You can turn up GOP. I think you could go as high as double your frame rate. So if you frame rate is 30, you could set it to 60.
You can turn up “B frames”. You could go as high as the GOP size.
You can reduce the Quality.
I can not tell you exactly which values to use because I do not know. All of those changes will create tradeoffs in the quality. So you will have to compare the output file with the source file to determine if you can detect quality loss. You may have to try a few combinations to find the best setting for your needs.
Thank you very much, this helps. I also discovered that indeed, while not using the hardware encoder makes my shotcut take literal hours to export the file, the size was considerably smaller (got it down to 4.62gbs). I will do further testing as well, but I think I have a better understanding of everything now.
This video was downloaded from Twitch via the Twitch Stream Manager (Content → Video Producer). In this example, this video also had a regular 30FPS when streamed from OBS. But when downloaded from Twitch, it converts it to a variable frame rate. Observe the odd frame rate in the Shotcut Properties window. At the bottom of the window is the convert option.
YouTube has a stupid setting for GOP. You don’t need to use YouTube setting to export a video that is uploaded to Youtube, just use the default. It will be much smaller in size.
Thank you very much for clarifying Hudson555x . This makes sense, and I wasn’t looking in that section when you told me about edit friendly. It’s true that the video said 29.999…etc for the framerate. I had just changed it to 30 in the export window and hadn’t seen the option.
Thank you for responding. Do you mean to not click any preset at all when exporting? Not even tweak the advanced settings and just click export? Just want to clarify.
Click on the “Default” Preset in the export. See below:
You can change other parameters if you want - like quality, but just doing this alone should shrink your exported video. It would be interesting if you could let us know how it did affect the size.
Hello again, when going to convert the video, I am presented with this (I clicked the Advanced and clicked to override the framerate to make it 30). Is this okay or should I not even do that? Should I keep it at ‘good’ or would that make a big decrease in quality?
Hey Elusien, the default option cannot be clicked for some reason when I go to export the same file. It just doesn’t stay clicked, I don’t know why. I can click seemingly everything else from that list, but not the ‘Default’ option.
Just to follow up on this: I went ahead just to see the result and click okay on the above settings to convert the video to ‘edit-friendly’, and the resulted video ended up being 25.9GB (reminder the same exact file unconverted to edit-friendly is 2.58gb)…I don’t know if this is intentional for the converted video to be gigantic and the followup edited video will then be smaller in size. Took hours to convert it.
Oh, also, now that the file is converted it is allowing me to click the default option. I don’t know, once again, why. If somebody could let me know why it allows me now and not before it’d help me. I’m going to try and convert with the default settings now and see. God I hope it’s not 50gb or something.
Another update on this. Like I said, I could not click the default option with the original video, but with the insanely big 25gb ‘edit friendly’ video I was able to export it. A few hours later it finally finished and the resulting video is exactly 7.71gb. So not a huge win as I was able to get a 4.62gb result with the youtube presets when I just didn’t use the hardware encoder option. A downside they both share is that it takes multiple hours to export the video.
for a video recorded at 2560x1440 and 60fps. Because YouTube will re-encode your video anyway, I figure I may as well export what I have in a lossless format so when YouTube un-munges the video to re-encode the quality should not diminish. Not too sure how this will effect file size.
