Greetings, I’m a newbie to the macOS as a long-time user of Windows.
I have been watching your youtube videos, during the time when my device was still shipping to at least prep myself for the new OS that I’ll be using, and I can’t quite recall if it was from your channel that I watched a video on how to actually change the file format for a screen recording through the native Quicktime Player to a more space-saving format.
So I just discovered that a mere 1 hour of screen recording took about 20Gb of space, and I was wondering is there something that I can tweak/change permanently on the native screen recorder to dramatically save space while not compromising the quality of the recorded video?
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EMark
There's no way to tell the native screen recorder to save as a different format. You would have to import the video into another app, like Apple's Compressor app, or something like VLC, and then export with new settings to compress it. The quality will decrease notably depending on your settings. More compression would mean a small file and less quality.
20GB makes perfect sense for a 1-hour video. Consider that a 2-hour DVD may contain about 4GB of data, or 2GB per hour. But DVDs are very low quality (1990s tech) compared to your screen. Old standard definition video would be 720x480 or 345,600 pixels. But your Mac's screen may be 2560x1440, which is 3.7 million or 10 times the number of pixels. So 20GB for 1 hour makes sense.
So the question is, what do you need a one-hour screen recording for? If I knew that, I could perhaps suggest a better solution for the problem. I do screen recording to create tutorials, but I rarely need to record for an hour. Even if I did, probably only s small portion of that would be needed after. So I could trim out parts I didn't need to reduce the file size.
In other cases, people record their screen to show someone what they are doing, like a training tool or to report a bug in software. But then you usually don't need to keep that around for long afterwards.
But what is your situation? What are you recording for one hour and why do you need to save it?