GoPro help

[SirAndy]

Hello chaps.
I treated myself to a GoPro Hero 7 White a couple of weeks ago, and I'd never had an action camera before. I thought I'd have a crack at making a small video of the car while doing some drives, the idea being to grab some footage from the inside looking forwards and backwards, and then from the outside etc., like some of the classic videos on YouTube

Having never used one before, I stuck it to a mount in the car and let in run with default settings for 12 minutes while on a drive. I was surprised to see that the MP4 file was 2.6 GB......
3264 x 2448
30 fps

I then downloaded VSDC Video Editor, and removed the first 4 minutes and the last 6 minutes - so was left with a 2 minute clip which I exported to a new MP4 at 720p and 30fps
The new file is still 420 MB

This still looks big to me.

Can anyone advise what is the optimal setting for the GoPro for recording video, and the optimal save setting for when I edit them afterwards if I want to upload to YouTube?
What is a suitable file upload size?

Cheers

Andy

[Tuna]

That's about normal. Video files are massive.

Do consider how your videos are going to be watched though. No point in recording at 4K/60 if people are going to be watching it in a little box in YouTube. 1080/30 is 'good enough' for just sharing a bit of footage.

Unless you're going to be properly editing and colour grading footage, you really don't need that high quality.

But even then, video files are massive.

[SirAndy]

Tuna said:

That's about normal. Video files are massive.

Do consider how your videos are going to be watched though. No point in recording at 4K/60 if people are going to be watching it in a little box in YouTube. 1080/30 is 'good enough' for just sharing a bit of footage.

Unless you're going to be properly editing and colour grading footage, you really don't need that high quality.

But even then, video files are massive.

Cheers Tuna - I think that's all I needed to know.... it just seemed bloody big to me.
Every day a school day

[eltawater]

Pop it through Handbrake and have a fiddle with the Quality slider under the Video tab until you reach an acceptable balance between quality and video size.

Remember your main target audience device (probably mobile phone) probably isn't going to notice a little degradation, and places like Youtube will also auto degrade based on connection quality anyway. The bigger the file, the longer it'll take to get it uploaded too...

https://handbrake.fr/

[SirAndy]

eltawater said:

Pop it through Handbrake and have a fiddle with the Quality slider under the Video tab until you reach an acceptable balance between quality and video size.

Remember your main target audience device (probably mobile phone) probably isn't going to notice a little degradation, and places like Youtube will also auto degrade based on connection quality anyway. The bigger the file, the longer it'll take to get it uploaded too...

https://handbrake.fr/

Thanks - I'll take a look at handbrake....