I put a .jpg image as the ‘video’ and then added an audio track and put a 20Kb mp3 file in there.
Then I stretched the jpg image so’s it lasted for the duration of the audio track (more than one hour) and thought I was done.
Exported the movie as Youtube type and went to look at it.
It hasn’t worked.
The thing is still creating the file. It is up to > 370K right now.
I’ve obviously done something wrong. What?
All I want is the audio track with a static pic while it runs.
Is it possible for you to attach a screenshot of the project in Shotcut, to try to clarify what is happening?
Was the project’s video mode “automatic” when you imported the image, or did you choose a video mode of your choice (e.g. HD 1080 30 FPS)?
How big is the image (resolution)?
Rendering 1h video will take some time, even if you just put an image as video track! How long did you wait for now? It can take up to 1 h (or more) for rendering, esp. when you added filters or your image has to be scaled to fit the video mode. Just wait and report back 
You answered your own question. An hour video will take a long time to render. The time needed will also depend on how fast your computer is.
My worry is not the length of time. It is the size of the file. I begin with a simple jpg and a 20kb mp3 - and I finish up with a 2GB file.
Doesn’t look right to me. Is it?
Is your 20kb mp3 file 1+ hour in length?
Could your MP3 possibly be 20mb instead?
@ejmillan asked you about the Video Mode and the specifications of your image.
Click on Ouput/Master, then Properties to see what your Video Mode is set to.
Providing more information about your project will be helpful.
Can you share the properties of your audio file?
Like this:
And details of your image.
And of your Video Mode.
Did you change anything in the export settings after selecting YouTube? If so, what did you change?
Hmmm - video codecs are working different from audio - and audio doesn’t take so much space compared with video. In video codecs every GOP (group of pictures) is compressed via a very complicated compression algorithm and every GOP will take space! So if you make a 1 h video just from 1 image, this image gets compressed a few times per second (thats like it works) and this just adds up to some memory space! For a 1 h video 2 GB really isn’t much! You should think of if you really need to make a video out of it, when its always the same image - this is pure nonsense to me! Look at the image and play the audio separately - fine
Or you have to choose a video codec that works completely different - i dont know of anything optimized for that purpose.
You can try to make the GOP as big as posssible (like 300 or more) and set the quality down to 20…30%. This would probably drop the size to below 1 GB, maybe a few 100 MB - but its still big for what you are doing.
You also can try to set the frame rate down as much as possible, it wouldn’t matter qualitywise as its always the same image. You can set the framerate to 1 (if possible?).
Well I don’t know any technicalities at all. That’s the problem. I’m just trying to make a video to put up on youtube so’s I can use their transcript utility, is all.
I put an image there because I don’t think I can just upload a mere audio file can I?
And yes, my mistake, sorry, 19MB. 19,300KB.
The problem with my suggestion with resp. to GOP probably is, YT expects a video in the format of a GOP of 15, that means you have the size of the image twice each second! And probably you cant change that much for YT. Honestly its pure nonsense to upload an audio file as video if you just show a simple image all the time and that for longer than 1 hour. Try to use just a blank space image - this should drop the size quite effectively. You can also experiment with the framerate - let us know your results
That is simply what their guidelines suggest and so our YouTube preset follows it closely to give people something close to what they are reading. But YouTube can actually handle a very large diversity of inputs, and the path to a better quality through YouTube is actually by not following their guidelines. You are correct that this short GOP is the main factor contributing to the large file size. My recommendation is not choose a preset and simply use the defaults, which has a GOP size of 5 seconds.
@abrogard also needs to understand there is a big difference between video and music file with album/cover art. Cover art is a single JPEG image, which is a small file size, whereas video is many pictures per second, which is a large file size. Shotcut cannot output an audio file with cover art. Also, I do not believe YouTube is able to convert an audio file with album art to a video. I tried just now with a mp3 file, and it does not accept it mp3.
So thanks for all that but what’s it mean to me? That what I did wrong was ask Shotcut to make a youtube file ‘with cover art’ if that’s what i wanted, because it can’t do it?
It is what I want because i think youtube will not accept this big file. Not sure on that but i think so.
So the moral of the story is find some other way to get a transcript or some other way to create the video?
I have uploaded videos much bigger than 4 GB to YT - no problem
But try to do what was suggested. Make GOP bigger and reduce the framerate.
Oh that’s good. So I misread. Vaguely remember something about ‘youtube pro’ or somesuch and length of time as well as size… Must have got it wrong.
Okay I’ll try to change the GOP and framerate but I’m very unsure, I don’t know much about shotcut at all, and if it’ll go up like this I might as well put it up and get the job done I suppose. You know I haven’t even tried yet.
If your YT-video is longer than 15 min. you just have to confirm your YT account via some cirtification process. Not very complicated but do that in advance before uploading your 1h YT-video - otherwise you just waste your time cause you have to re-upload after confirmation. Thats service by YT!
Well I actually put up the 2G version. I had to do as you said, confirm my account. It didn’t get a transcript though so I reset it to public thinking that would help. But it didn’t. so i went to reset it back to private and couldn’t find where to do it.
So it’s still up there and public. I messaged YT help forum about it but got no response as yet.
For YouTube…
Open Studio, click on Videos, hover over Visibility of the video, click the drop down menu and select Private. Perhaps for a transcription you have to set the language of the video. To set the language select the video, then Edit, then Video Language. Not sure how fast the transcription takes place, but it does happen.
I will add that I’ve seen a few videos of meetings where the transcriptions are very poor, at least in English. I’m not sure about what level of clarity YouTube needs to offer a clear transcription.
Thanks for that. I had to go one step further. I was looking at the video thumbnail on the channel dashboard. I needed to click on ‘videos’.
so that’s alright. I’ve fixed that and it is private again. but no sign of any transcript and I don’t see anywhere i can set the process in motion. I might have to look for some other way.
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