Exporting Gives Warning

(Shotcut v. 20.03.17; 2 or 3 yrs old Win 10.) I have created a 30 min. video, which I would like to export to .mp4 and upload to YouTube. But when I try to export, I get the message: “The drive you have chosen has only 16363 MiB of free space.” When I pay no attention to the warning and export anyway, it fails to do a complete job of exporting. My Windows C/: says “15.8 GB free of 118 GB.” (My computer came with 16 GB of Ram.) Incidentally, what is “MiB”? Is that Megabyte? What is this message telling me about the dilemma I’m in?

Historically a kilobyte (kB) was 1024 bytes, a megabyte (MB) was 1024 kBs and a gigabyte (GB) was 1024 MBs. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte)

The standards groups eventually objected as in normal standards “k” stands for 1 thousand (1,000), “M” stands for 1 million (for 1,000,000) etc., so they came up with new units called “kibibytes” (kiB), “Mebibytes” (Mib) and “Gibibytes” (GiB). Not many people use them, but they are precise, whereas some manufacturers use the old values for MB, GB while others use the new values.

To all intents and purposes 1MiB is the same as 1MB.

Regarding your problem though, please post a copy of the export job’s log.

What does that mean? Does it say it failed, or is it shorter than what you expected?

Regarding the warning, it is easy for a long video with high settings to consume many GB. I have seen videos that are hundreds of gigs. Shotcut cannot predict how big a file will be created (that would require severely restricting your export options). So, it checks if you have less than 25 GiB free and issues a friendly warning. It would be very bad if Shotcut fills your hard drive. The least we can do is say we warned you. I do not recommend creating many videos on a 118 GB system without an external drive.

What specifications should I look for in purchasing an external drive?

What does that mean? It drops clips.

I have heard other people report this but never seen it myself in 8 years while working on it. Restart Shotcut, reopen the project, and see if reports missing clips.

I will do this but I can’t do it now. I messed the entire project up when I deleted everything in order to make more room, and unfortunately it will take me a few days to get to the point where I can save it as a .mp4. I’ll get back to you when I finish.

If you do get an external disk (you can get a decent 1 TB USB 3.0 external disk drive for less than $50) it is worth getting two and using the second one to take regular backups of your files. That way if you accidentally delete some, or the one with the main files on it breaks, you don’t lose any data.

I use syncbackfree (https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/index.html) to take regular backups of all 3 of my systems at home.

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