For a while, I was exporting at 30 or 60 FPS and couldn’t help but notice that the true framerate of the exported video, though reportedly 30 or 60 FPS respectively, appeared to be far lower. After much research online to no prevail, I decided to look around the settings myself and found my problem was not in the export settings at all.
Under “Settings>Project>Video Mode” are what I thought were configurations for the preview video but actually turned out to be options that alter the true state of your video. It turned out those settings were set at HD 1080p 23.98 fps, which set the maximum framerate (whether or not the export framerate was set higher) to be 23.98 fps. I find it useful to change those settings to lower res/FPS for the sake of reducing lag in the preview while editing. Just make sure they’re set at the settings you want once you’re done editing.
I don’t see the purpose in having those settings affect the exported video. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems redundant and unhelpful to me. Please consider changing this, Shotcut.
Notice there are disabled words in the Settings menu that define separate sections: Project, Player, and User Interface.
I find it useful to change those settings to lower res/FPS for the sake of reducing lag in the preview while editing.
That is a bad idea. See the docs:
I don’t see the purpose in having those settings affect the exported video.
You have it backwards: they primarily define what is to be exported. You need to define your project attributes ahead of time. Settings > Preview Scaling, on the other hand, is a way to preview things at a lower resolution. There is nothing like that for frame rate though.
The export settings are the ones that are redundant. They let you resample a project from old attributes to new ones - not magically but through simple frame rate adjustment (i.e. dropping or repeating) and scaling. They are best used for down-sampling from high to low. Why? For special situations where you need to output a project to a different target. If you do not like that, then do not use them and always use Video Mode. I did try to guide you by putting these into the Advanced section of Export and by putting Video mode into the New Project view of the startup screen.
Some people want me to dumb it down more so it is harder to cut yourself. Other people want something more complicated and fully featured.
@JamotKang You have all the right concepts… the problem is applying them backwards.
Video Mode defines the true state of the project and timeline. Set it once at the beginning of a project then don’t touch it anymore. Clips could shift on the timeline if the Video Mode is altered.
Preview Scaling reduces lag by processing video and filter coordinates at a lower resolution.
The Export screen provides override options that allow a project with a 4K timeline to be exported in 1080p should a client want both versions. As Dan said, if the overrides differ from the Video Mode, then the export will do a simple resize/drop/duplicate of the frames produced by the Video Mode. As in, don’t set the Video Mode to 1080p then override export to 4K because it will stretch the timeline’s 1080p output up to 4K and look blurry rather than process data in native 4K.