hello, I know there are similar posts out there about huge file sizes, but i haven’t been able to get help off of them to fix my problem so I decided to ask for help… so i’ve been using shotcut for years and the file sizes with my current settings are around 300,090-400,00 kb…then i finally got around to upgrading to windows 11 and now, using the same exact file it is now around 1,611,752kb… i have not changed any export settings, the quality is the same (55%), the encoder is the same (h254_nvenc h264_qsv), i have tried uninstalling and reinstalling shotcut, i made sure all of my drivers are up to date, i rolled back to an older version of shotcut, i changed my encoders to hevc-nvenc and hevc_qsv), none of these have helped make smaller files, in fact sometimes the files get even bigger…i don’t know what else to do, can someone please help me? thank you
If you disable the hardware encoder checkbox is it any better?
If you are not comparing the exact same project with a prior version and another version, then your comparison is completely invalid regardless equivalent export settings.
Je ne comprends pas ce que W11 vient faire avec la taille des exports
si vous faites des exports avec le réglage de qualité vous ne maitrisez rien
Il faut faire vos export en CBR constant bit rate
je n’utilise que ça !
Pour exemple:
20 Mb/s pour du 1080 25p en h264 10 Mb/s en hevc
35 Mb/s pour du 4k 50p
it is the exact same project with no changes
i did test it without and the test file was slightly smaller without the encoder, like 1.4 million kb instead of 1.6 million kb but still way larger than then original export file size
This is not good advice. Constant bitrate is generally wasteful and only really intended for special situations. Yes, it can make reaching a target file size more predictable, but that is generally a bad idea.
I completely disagree.
With Premiere Pro, I always export at a constant bitrate.
With VBR, you can save a few bytes, but it’s not significant.
We talked about this a lot on the Digital Repair forum site regarding the Voukoder export boost.
And we saw that quality-based exports were a big joke where we had no control over the output file size.
This is true for Adobe Premiere and the Voukoder plug-in, and it’s also true for ShotCut.
The requester should try it with the constant bitrate I’m proposing.
I’d be surprised if they weren’t satisfied.
Sorry for my export tutorial, which is in French.
You don’t want it, that’s okay!
Bad advice, you say!!!
But how is your advice better than mine?
I’ve been editing for over 20 years
Magix Edius then Premiere Pro
I’m just as well placed as you (and probably even more experienced than you) to give advice!!!
Um your forum is very painful to use
Of course, this can be a bad idea for someone who doesn’t know the appropriate bitrate for their format and codec.
But I provided information on the bitrate selection.
If it was a bad idea, I would have realized it because I’m very well equipped for broadcasting.
70" 4K TV, video projector with a 2.60m screen in a dedicated room.
4K TV watching my 4K clips from 1.40m away, it doesn’t forgive a bad export.
You should try it and reconsider.
Best regards,
ShotCut, which isn’t my main software, is one of the best free software.
I recommend it on my forum to beginners looking for effective free software.
Congratulations on this.
Why do you care about that?
The requester should try it with the constant bitrate I’m proposing.
There is something else @barrechick has different in the comparison besides OS version that they have not yet figured out. Sure, your proposal can be tried and adjusted to bring down the file size, but quality should also be compared.
how is your advice better than mine?
Because I made a non-linear video editor; I have been working with video compression for broadcast, cellular, and internet streaming for the past 20 years; and I have been in digital video software engineering for 30 years. My first experience with Adobe Premiere was in 1995:
CBR can look great on a large screen like you have. But the file size will be larger than VBR if done right.
The main issue is how does one know which bitrate to pick for their CBR video export? Talking head video is much easier to compress than sports action. A bitrate that works for all cases including sports action would waste tons of bits if applied to talking head. What if a video included both talking head and action? CBR is going to waste bits or lose quality. Something has to give.
With VBR, that trade-off is not required because the bitrate adapts as needed, and usually ends up significantly smaller for the same quality. It’s easy to pick a quality target and then the file size lands where it does. The file size is immaterial except for live streaming or constrained storage scenarios.
Dan is right on all counts.
Your avatar is misleading; it’s a photo of a 20-year-old.
We owe each other mutual respect.
“how is your advice better than mine?”
You get the same quality with a smaller export.
At the current price per gigabyte, that’s certainly not a big selling point.
I just tested it on a 4K 4:2:2 10-bit A6700 rush.
Export at 70% quality: 109,441 KB
Export at CBR 40 Mbps: 83,318 KB (and a little faster).
Tested the quality on my 30" with Premiere, stacking the two exports on top of each other, full-screen viewing on the 30" at 1600 x 2560 and scaled 100.
No visible difference.
So, quite honestly, I think we can recommend this option.
But it’s true that for many video novices, your advice should be taken into account because they may be using a bitrate that’s too low or too high for the codec and format.
Okay, let’s say both pieces of advice are worth it.
Hey, you don’t need a 10-minute rush to test the two export options.
It’s quick and easy.
Sincerely,
Also, keep in mind “VBR” used to mean average bitrate, which is why in Shotcut I wrote “Quality-based VBR” and “Average Bitrate.” So, “VBR” should be qualified which you are talking about!
Nowadays, if you want put a limit on the bitrate or file size but it is OK to be lower, “Constrained VBR” is preferred. Bitrate and buffer size can be difficult to choose unless you have some target that specifies it. In addition to channel or file size constraints bitrate to use depends on resolution, frame rate, and codec. That is a lot of factors, but it gives some people plenty of things to talk about. A quality percent is adaptive but unfortunately also depends on the encoder implementation as I have not normalized that field within Shotcut. What I have done is adjust its default value somewhat per codec standard.
Your avatar is misleading; it’s a photo of a 20-year-old.
It is my doppelganger, James Spader, from the promo material for his movie Crash.
Tested the quality on my 30" with Premiere, stacking the two exports
Shotcut integrates the well regarded video quality Measurement tool VMAF. With a reference video opened, choose Properties > menu-button > Measure Video Quality. Next, choose an export result. It creates a job. When done, double-click the job to view the report. The Propertes menu also includes a bitrate viewer.
Back on topic
No more news from Barrechick
I really don’t understand Windows 11’s role in file size.
He should try exporting with a fixed bitrate
But he was advised against it (somewhat wrongly in his case).
On the other hand, he mentions file size but provides no information on the format and length of the clip.
MediaInfo would be welcome.
And that’s precisely the problem with this test. 70% quality is in visually lossless territory similar to ProRes. CBR 40Mbps probably will not be, especially for an action scene. This will not be evident in an eyeballed stacked track comparison because both encodings are high quality. The difference will be noticed when doing a VMAF comparison or when pushing an extreme color grade. I would wager that the CBR file will break down faster under extreme color grading because the CBR file is carrying much less information. If the response is “I won’t be grading the final file so it doesn’t matter”, then the point is that 70% is too high a setting for that use case, which means the file size could be made smaller. 70% and 40Mbps are not equal quality targets.
My goal here is to get away from the suggestion of the OP attempting a CBR encoding when that has nothing to do with their immediate problem, and neither would it be a better solution. It would only derail troubleshooting the problem at hand.
EDIT: All my references to VBR mean quality-based CRF-style encoding, not average bitrate encoding. If that’s where the confusion is, then my apologies. True, the difference between constant and average bitrate modes is usually pretty small. But the difference between quality-based and average/constant is more pronounced.
I don’t understand.
The requester seems to have no control over the volume of his exports.
He thinks Windows 11 is at fault.
I need someone to explain this to me.
Didn’t he think to export while locking the bitrate?
Is he a beginner?
If you export in CBR 40Mb/s, the export software takes this into account, and the volume, based on the video’s duration, is easy to calculate.
But hey, in the Digital Repair forum (Repaire Numérique), we don’t really like an internet user who provides so little information.
I translated one of his answers: It’s not at all clear what he’s saying.
Granted, all of us have less information than we need to solve the problem.
Windows 11 changed, but it sounds like “all drivers were updated” could have been a change as well, especially with the Nvidia driver. But it’s odd that file sizes for QuickSync would change as well. It’s extra odd that sizes from libx264 would change at all, given it has no dependencies on drivers or hardware.
The OP is doing an export at 55% CRF-style quality. Whether that is the best way to export is secondary to the idea that exporting the same source video with the same export settings should produce files of the same size. But for some reason, sizes are different after something changed. The OP was happy with previous file sizes using these settings, so changing the encoding method is not the priority.
The only change that stands out to me is the driver update.
I somewhat wonder if the OP had changed the quality level to something lower than 55% in their default or favorite export preset, and now that’s gone and reverted back to default 55% after reinstalling Shotcut.
Is there any chance the source video is 4K and the exported videos were previously scaled down to 1080p? But now Shotcut is exporting at 4K instead of scaling down? I was playing around with other files today and noticed the file size difference between 4K and 1080p using hardware encoding is similar to the jump we see here. This is highly dependent on settings, of course.
thank you for replying to me, I will gladly answer any questions you have i just didn’t know what information you needed to help to put in my original post…i totally agree it is an odd problem, i never lowered the quality below 55%, and i’m not using 4k to start with… i just don’t have a ton of storage space for my videos to eat up so much space when they didn’t used to…so if there is a setting in shotcut that is different from my old settings i can’t find it… i made sure all the drivers were up to date after the upgrade to windows 11, i can go back to an old one and test if if you think that may make a difference
You’re doing good. It would be very helpful if we had metadata to compare between a previous export and a new export.
Please try this:
Bring one of the videos into Shotcut. Go to the Properties panel, click the three-line hamburger menu in the lower-left corner, click “More information…”, then copy-paste the lines of text to us here. If we have that information for both videos, that gives us a good chance at spotting the difference.