Ask Paul: October 13 (Premium)

Happy Friday and welcome to the end of our Activision Blizzard nightmare. Let's get the weekend kicked off extra early for a change: I'm flying to Mexico City this afternoon, so I had to file this one early.
Clipchamp limitations
staganyi asks:

I tried Clipchamp for the first time because I had to trim a video (~300MB 1080p HD mp4 file). When I exported from Clipchamp to the same format, 1080p HD, the file size ballooned to ~800MB+. I couldn't find any settings in the app (e.g. bitrate) or online to address that other than reducing the resolution. Maybe that's a limitation of the free version?

No, unfortunately, that's just a limitation of Clipchamp, period. There are no export options beyond the quality level (1080p, etc.). There are others I've identified---you can't apply video stabilization to a clip, for example---but it's so good generally that I just kind of deal with it. But this one could be problematic.

And on that note, I just used Clipchamp to create a 23-minute video for YouTube. And I, too, was surprised by its size (3.24 GB). This made me wonder if something had changed since this past summer, so I looked at some previous videos. And sure enough, a similar length (20 minutes) video I created previously is significantly smaller, at 1.79 GB. Both of these videos are very similar in that they both use a lot of image assets. That said, the newer video has a few video assets too, and maybe that is the cause.

But your experience sounds quite different, just a single video that you trimmed down. So it's unclear what's going on there.

I should be making several videos while we're in Mexico over the next three weeks, so I will keep on eye on this.
Auto-sync photos between OneDrive and Google Photos
staganyi asks:

I've been following your digital decluttering series with great interest and is inspiring me to do the same. Starting off with pictures, I use Android and my phone automatically backs them up to Google Photos and OneDrive. Now, if I delete a picture in Google Photos from the phone, that doesn't flow back to OneDrive and the picture remains there. Is there an app I can use that will compare files in 2 folders and flag the ones that don't match (those should be the deleted files from phone/Google Photos that are not deleted in OneDrive)?

This is tricky.

It sounds like what you want is a way to sync your phone photos on the phone, after the fact, which I do understand, though I've never heard of such a thing. I never really worried about this need per se, but I also try to delete unwanted/poorly shot photos while out in the world with the phone, as it won't sync to either service over cellular (by default, which is how I've left it). That way, those shots don't sync at all.

The other option, I guess, would be a service that would handle this in the cloud. And I'm sure something like that does exist, though if you're going to do that there's probably no need to backup photos to both services from t...