Understanding that I am not very bright, want the best audio quality possible, but am not overly concerned about video quality, what can I do to make the combined file size of my exports from Shotcut to be around 500 mb here?
I am way in over my head here. I do a community radio show in Fargo, ND, and just want my videos to be decent, but want the audio to be as clean as it comes (I’m not sure what the setup we have in the studio is, actually, but I pull a file and bring it home to chop out the breaks).
The original hour long file is range of 3.5 gb, when I chop up the videos and upload each segment to Youtube, using the Youtube export settings, the combined file size of the 45 minutes is 4.18 gb.
when I redownload the files back from youtube after uploading, the combined file size is 500 mb…
Understanding that I am not very bright, want the best audio quality possible, but am not overly concerned about video quality, what can I do to make the combined file size of my exports from Shotcut to be around 500 mb here?
Why 500 MB? Just because that is what you downloaded from YouTube, which re-compresses heavily in a lossy manner. Is 4 GB too slow to upload?
The first recommendation is to use the Export defaults instead of the YouTube preset. The YouTube preset was only made to provide something that conforms to their published guidelines. But they really only provided the guidelines in order to provide an answer to a frequently asked question: how should I export from my editor? However, YouTube does and must accept a lot more variety than their guidelines in order to gain their reputation as the most reliable service.
So, our Export defaults deviate just a little from their guidelines to provide a better compression with no loss in quality over the YouTube preset. The “defaults” means you change nothing in Export after you start Shotcut. But if you are already running and changed something you can either click the Default preset or the Reset button in the Export panel to get back to there.
Now, the next easiest step is to reduce the resolution and/or frame rate. For future projects, use Settings > Video Mode to control that. For an existing project you can use the Export > Advanced > Video parameters, but make sure you keep the same aspect ratio to avoid black bars.