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 qui...