Final cut pro export file size is huge (despite the small size of the initial video) - how can I shrink it?

Question

I'm a complete novice at final cut. I have recorded a dnd game over zoom, it's a 2 hour video, the file saved from zoom is 756mb. I have edited it a bit (just minor stuff, add a couple of images, remove a few outtakes), and now I'm trying to export.

I'm exporting the "master file", format "computer", video codec "H.264". It shows me 11GB estimated file size. Why is it so huge? What setting can I tweak to reduce it?

Do you know why this happens in general? Why would it turn my ~750MB file into ~11GB file?

Answer 1

A Master file export is a multipass high-resolution export. Its meant for archiving or transcoding into other formats.

Also, your Zoom recording is probably in a format what is not natively compatible with FCPX and was transcoded into ProRes during import. ProRes is excellent for editing, saving space is not its purpose.

Depending on where you want to publish your video you should choose different export presets, what will trade size for quality or vice versa. However, I doubt you can export in the same format than the recording from Zoom, so export size might vary significant.