Best and Worst Practices with Microsoft Clipchamp
Published: 2024-01-10 18:48:25

Not long ago, my first video course on Udemy was about this free video editor I found already installed on Windows. I just completed three other courses using just Clipchamp.

Microsoft acquired Clipchamp a few years ago and now it’s even part of their Microsoft 365 enterprise edition. So there are big expectations for this little unknown tool, that basically replaced the Windows Media Player…

To me it was both a necessity and an opportunity to explore and learn about video editing, in the first place. The product was frustrating at times, but I learned to avoid some not-so-obvious traps that I will also share here with you.

## 1. Avoid Huge Webcam Recording Files

Clipchamp comes with a built-in web camera and screen recording, which is great. However, recording with both Camera and Screen will produce very large WEBM files for your camera. Less than 10 minutes with just your talking-head will be saved in more than 1 GB on disk! When whole 2–3 hours movies were saved a while ago on DVDs with 4.7 GB. 

You wonder why such a high resolution is required for just your talking-head, when we capture mostly the screen, after all.

## 2. Avoid Running Out of Disk Space

Clipchamp is using browser-based technologies, so plenty of files are saved in browser caches, downloaded on disk, generated as MP4s, spread a bit everywhere. If you’re not careful enough, you may run in no time out of disk space. I had almost 200 GB saved on disk in just a few days of experimenting and recording.

The best practice would be to periodically transfer to a personal online storage — like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox etc. — the files accumulated in your Downloads folder. And make sure they will be saved only remotely, when you are done with recording your course.

## 3. Edit Only One-Shot Video Recordings

When you use both screen and camera recordings, try to limit every segment to max 5–6 minutes and don’t add anything else to your project. The Webcam recording, as I said before, could generate close to 1 GB and slow down considerably your computer, the editing process and the video generation. If you start combining multiple recordings, then editing them all together, in the same project, you may end up with producing a video with the image and sound not in sync.

So, super-important: keep small video recordings, in separate projects, and edit them one by one. Then generate an MP4 video file from each, and combine them eventually, as MP4 media files this time, in another new Clipchamp project.

## 4. Edit Separate Intros and Outros

It’s customary to create and use short video introductions and other media material for the transitions. But always create them separately, in different project files. Then generate individual MP4 files and combine these files in a final project, that will generate your final MP4.

The rule of thumb is you should come up with a final project that combines just generated MP4 files edited already in other separate projects. This final project should contain only merged tracks, transitions and small adjustments, with a background music eventually.

{% embed https://youtu.be/o1HZ21DaMmM %}

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