I have about 6 hours of video footage in a Premiere Elements project. What I notice is that when I export the entire movie, its about 4 Gb in size. But when I edit it down considerably to about a 20 minute video and then export it, the file size is still about 4 Gb even though the video only runs for 20 minutes. Is there a setting that somehow is supposed to delete the excess stuff? Or am I doing something wrong? It takes several hours to upload these to YouTube. And of the 6 hours of footage I will make about 15 videos that are about 20 minutes long each, so this is a problem that I can't ignore.
I can understand that the rendering will still take a long time because Premiere has to cycle through the entire length of the original videos, but when they are exported, the file size should be more or less linearly correlated with the length of the video, all else being equal, right?