We Need to Talk About Clipchamp (Premium)

As a recent and enthusiastic convert to Clipchamp, I am impressed by this video editor’s ease of use and extensive list of advanced features. This is a mix that’s almost impossible to deliver, but Clipchamp—a web app, no less—does just that.

But Clipchamp isn’t perfect. As I use it more and more—since July, it’s been my go-to video editor for the Eternal Spring YouTube channel that my wife and I made to discuss our experiences in Mexico City—I have occasionally run into small issues or bits of missing functionality. And some of them are confusing, given how much it can do. It’s not like my needs are particularly advanced.

Here’s a simple example: While Clipchamp supports applying various filters, effects, color adjustments, intro and outro fade, and playback speed changes, it doesn’t offer some effects that I consider obvious and necessary, like video stabilization.

But on Thursday evening, the night before we flew to Mexico City, I saw something new (to me) that gave me pause: I used Clipchamp to create a 23-minute video for the channel ahead of the trip, and I was surprised by how long it took to export. When it was done, I saw why: This video takes up 3.4 GB on disk, which seemed overly large to me. And so it also took a long time to upload and process, which was likewise not welcome.

The export process is among those Clipchamp features that are perhaps too simple: When you’re done editing a video, you click the “Export” button and only have a single configuration choice to make, the video quality, which can be 480p, 720p, or 1080p if you’re not paying for a Clipchamp Essentials subscription. And that’s it. Once you make your selection, Clipchamp just exports your video, using whatever internal settings it has for each choice.

Looking at the properties of a video it exported—I always choose 1080p, of course—you can see various attributes that you may wish to configure before the export, among them the file format, video bitrate, frame rate, and audio bitrate. The choices Clipchamp makes are reasonable, I guess, with decent audio and video bitrates and a 30 FPS frame rate. But you don’t have a choice regardless. And those choices, were they available, would each impact the file size of the export.

Beyond that, it seems like there would be simpler user interfaces that could hide the complexity from users. Perhaps they want to fit a certain file size, for example, and the underlying settings could be adjusted automatically. But whatever is really happening, Clipchamp doesn’t seem to be optimizing its output all that well, or at all. It’s unclear why.

I might have let this one go for a bit, but on Friday morning, a reader coincidentally asked me about this exact issue in Ask Paul. He, too, had noticed that the export sizes were unnecessarily humongous. So I decided I’d look into it. Of course, I was flying that day, and because I didn’t think I’d get to it all that quickly, I created a stub document in my To-do folder to keep it top of mind.

But then I connected to the Wi-Fi on the plane, so I could work on the book a bit and write a Premium article that will go up sometime this weekend. And then I started noodling around in To-do to see what I should do next. And seeing that Clipchamp document, I decided to look into it. I figured the most obvious thing would be to test a few other video editors, either by duplicating a video I’d made in Clipchamp or by importing a Clipchamp exported video using the same settings and comparing the two.

Both of those were impossible on the plane: I hadn’t anticipated wanting to do these things and didn’t have the videos or the other apps on the PC I was using. So I just started researching video exporting and seeing what was out there. And I came across a free, open-source, and cross-platform video editor called Shotcut that I don’t believe I’d ever heard of. There’s also a paid (~$9) version in the Microsoft Store that auto-updates and has no ads, and in a moment of impulse, I decided to just buy it. The Wi-Fi on the plane let me do that, but it didn’t let me download it, of course, so I had to wait until today to actually try it out.

It’s an interesting app. It’s more complex than Clipchamp, of course, almost all video editors are, but not as complex as apps like Da Vinci Resolve, of course, because almost no video editors are. And I’ve not even scraped the surface of what it can do. Because for now, all I really care about it exporting some video and comparing it with what Clipchamp did.

To do this, I downloaded two of our Eternal Spring videos, the 3.4 GB monster mentioned above and a smaller 540 MB video that’s less than 6 minutes long. I imported each into Shotcut, separately, and just exported them at 1080p/30 FPS.

The results were startling.

The 3.4 GB video had shrunk down to just 461 MB. Granted, it had a much smaller video bitrate (2733 kbps vs. 19,710 kbps), but it also had a higher audio bitrate (247 kbps vs 191 kbps). Subjectively, the videos “look” identical to me when played back in VLC media player. And that’s all I really care about: I’m not creating 8K Hollywood blockbusters here.

The smaller video saw similar improvements with no obvious negative side effects to the qualityd. The 540 MB video was reduced to just 36.1 MB, with an 873 kbps video bitrate (vs. 12,846 kbps) and a 243 kbps audio bitrate (vs 157 kbps).

These are significant savings. Quite significant.

Looking ahead, I’d love to see Clipchamp improve in this important regard, and the sooner the better. But in the short term, I suppose there are two obvious workarounds. You can learn and use a different video editor, perhaps Shotcut, for all video editing. (And I’m sure more advanced editors will offer even more output control than Shotcut.) Or, you can keep using Clipchamp because it’s so easy to use, and then re-export its output using Shotcut to get smaller file sizes and/or more control over the final product.

I am going to experiment with the latter over the next few Eternal Springs videos because I love using Clipchamp and don’t have the time or energy to learn yet another complex tool to do the same thing. My only concern is time: Shotcut took nearly 13 minutes to export that 23-minute video, and that’s not ideal. But I will rationalize this by noting that the resulting upload to YouTube and processing will both be commensurately shorter because the source file will be so much smaller. This may actually prove to be an efficient process overall.

We’ll see. For now, exporting is Clipchamp’s Achilles Heel. And since that’s such an important part of the process, and is so obviously poorly done, I can understand why this alone is a blocker to some in using this app. But I will workaround it for now.