Why does Adobe Premiere increase video size even when nothing has been done?

Question

I record my screen using Adobe Captivate. A 10 minutes recording results in a video of 15 MB in size, with acceptable quality for educational purposes.

Now I take that video into Adobe Premiere to edit. However, even if I just open it and export it, I can't get that 15 MB size anymore and it always export in a much higher size.

Adobe Captivate's recording info:

Windows Properties:

Media Info:

As you can see, Captivate records videos in MP4 format. Thus in Adobe Premiere I choose H.264 as the export format to get MP4 file type. Now no matter what I do to reduce the size, it never gets less than 25 MB. This is so frustrating, specially that these two apps come from the same company. Even with any Preset and even if I reduce the Target Bitrate to the lowest value, still I can't get below 25 MB.

How can I export in Premiere so that I get the same size as what I had in Captivate?

Answer 1

You cannot do this with Premiere.

The media info of the recording tell us that you need a maximum video bitrate of 0.108 Mbps to achieve 15 Mbyte. However Premiere's smallest available bitrate is 0.19 Mbps which would yield a 23 Mbyte final video (including the audio) in theory which is pretty close to what you see. As far as I know you cannot get below that.

If this bothers you, contact Adobe for help. Technically there is no obvious reason to stop at 0.19 Mbps. Tools like ffmpeg can work with even lower bitrates with this codec.