Today’s public service announcement…
If you happen to screen record on your macbook and create a MOV file - it will be huge. If you then re-encode it to an MP4 you can save 7-8x the space for (to my eye) no discernible decay in audio or video.
ffmpeg -i input.mov -c copy output.mp4
| From | To | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| 246M | 33M | 7.5x |
| 22.9G | 2.9G | 7.9x |
I think it’s probably because writing a less lossy format is quicker, so you can capture what you want without possibly hitting IO limitations.
It’s not fast though - re-encoding 23G to 2.9G took hours on my 8 core MacBook Air.