The approach that I have taken to create a simple 75 minute training video is as follows:
1. I prepared a series of PowerPoint slides to be used as the video portion
2. I displayed each slide in PowerPoint "SlideShow" mode, did a "PrtSc" for each slide and saved each screen capture as a .jpg (I created 163 images, total 22 Meg, average 135K per .jpg)
3. I wrote a script and recorded / cleaned up using Audacity. MP3 file created was 28 Meg in size
4. I opened Kdenlive and created a new project using HD 720p / 25fps, 1 audio track (for my MP3) and 1 video track (for my .jpg images)
5. I "added clip" all the .jpg and moved them to the video track to synch with the MP3 audio track
6. I rendered to create a webm file (MP4 was not available... perhaps I need an add-on) which was 278 Meg
7. I used http://webmtomp4.online/ to create MP4 (other free online converters could not handle such as large file size). The resulting MP4 was 142 Meg

Everything works and I am happy with the outcome. Here are my questions:
1. Is there a "smarter" way to do it (I am most comfortable with PowerPoint to create the images)?
2. The file seems quite large (or perhaps this is a reasonable size for a 75 minute video which is basically a narrated PowerPoint?). Is my selection of "HD 720p / 25fps" the best choice?

Any advice?

Perhaps you can use a sceen recording ( video and audio) like icecream screen recorder https://icecreamapps.com/Screen-Recorder/ ou free sreen recorder https://www.dvdvideosoft.com/fr/product ... corder.htm and make the final video editing with kdenlive.
To have the mp4 codec in kdenlive windows you have to install a specific ffmpeg like described here : https://kdenlive.org/download/ section Windows

Hi jpasturel,

Thanks for your suggestions on the screen recording applications... they appear to have more features than I really need.

I added the mp4 codec and it works fine... saves me a step (no need to convert from webm to mp4) but the file size is about the same

Is my selection of "HD 720p / 25fps" the best choice? I feel that the file size is larger than I expected.

Thanks,
Rob

140 Mo for a video of 75 mn is not very huge.
you can test with a 480p format and see if it is always correct

For 75 minutes, that is a tiny file.

One of my videos (720P 30FPS) is 15 minutes long and is 900 Megabytes in size - the quality is very good though.

jpasturel wrote:140 Mo for a video of 75 mn is not very huge.
you can test with a 480p format and see if it is always correct

if 163 images totally different requires 22 Mbytes of space .. using a different codec (or resolution with some sort of imterpolation) can increase size to 30-40.. if there are some SOLVE/DISSOLVE effects.. maybe add another 20/40 megabytes of space.. .. a 75Min MP3 can be 70Mbyte to 100 Mbyte... seems that the rendering size is correct.

if the MP3 is just 5 Mbytes (but repeating continuosly).. on the final rendering uses again 70/100 Mbytes.

Thanks jpasturel, crodgers, and bartoloni… your answers have been helpful. Looks like I am on the right track.

robmoult wrote:Thanks jpasturel, crodgers, and bartoloni… your answers have been helpful. Looks like I am on the right track.

you can also use the H264 codec (that can reduce the final size)
this is for example the profile that i'm using to render videos(720) of my quadcopter.

Code: Select all

<profile speeds="preset=slower;preset=medium;preset=faster;preset=ultrafast" category="Custom" name="Render720 - dominating (H264/AAC) -Q23 -A128 YUV420P" extension="mp4" args="properties=x264-medium f=mp4 vcodec=libx264 acodec=aac g=120 crf=23 ab=128+'k' mlt_image_format=yuv420p"/>