Trying to make smaller videos

ActivePresenter Support Questions
1

Problem:
I make some videos with my Canon Vixia HF200 and unlike the old camcorders that used tapes with this one every pause in recording creates an individual .MTS file. I’ve learned to play them back as a VLC Media Player’s playlist but that is a lot more inconvenient than just clicking on one icon and having it play the whole set as one video. So I tried playing a group back as a playlist and recording that with ActivePresenter Free Edition Version 9.1.4 - 64-bit build. It recorded nicely and played back with no visual degradation that I could detect, but the resulting video was a lot!! larger than the group of individual clips. I was hoping it would be smaller since it’s all now on one file instead of a lot of individual ones. Now I’m hoping there’s something in the settings that can be changed to make it if not smaller at least a whole lot less larger.

It says something about creating a slide show as it get ready to render (or whatever it’s called) but I don’t want slides or a slide show and don’t even know where they are stored if there really are slides created. I’d like to not have slides created and if there are a bunch of them stored on my hard drive I’d like to remove them. Does anyone know if they do exist and if so how to find them? Removing them if they exist wouldn’t have a negative influence on the videos that were created, would it?

The following group of items is brought up in the window before it begins to…render?..process?..finalize?..export?.. The items in the Rendering Options group are the items that are checked. Can I uncheck all but Export Audio without losing anything in the resulting video? If so would that help produce a smaller file in the long run?

Rendering Options
Include Zoom-n-Pan, Include Cursor Path, Export Audio, Export Closed Captions as Soft Subtitles

Video
Video Size (%): 100, Width: 649, Height: 367, Frame Rate: 60, Quality: 100

Audio
Channels: Stereo, Sample Rate 44100 Hz, Quality: 90

Output
Format: MP4 (H.264, AAC)

Thank you for any help trying to learn this stuff!!

David
Maine, USA

ActivePresenter version: 9.1.4 - 64-bit build

OS: Windows 10

Notes:

2

Have you considered trying to convert the MTS files to a supported video file, import them, and stitch them together in AP directly?

I cannot guarantee the result you desire but if I were in your shoes - it is something that I would try.

3

I don’t understand exactly what that means but do use Shutter Encoder to convert them to .mp4 files which works well. If that is the first step you were referring to,
it is done. From there how to stitch them together? Would that make them into one .mp4 or would it just play them like a play list but they would remain individual files?

4

At this point, then, I would import each of your converted videos to AP and place them on the timeline in the order you want them in.

Here are a couple tutorials about it that might help.