This is extremely efficient compression! (for comparison, standard definition DVDs rarely pack more than 4hrs of video onto 7GB of space). If you have ~5hrs of video in 4.73GB of data, that must be encoded at ~2.1Mbit per second. It is designed to store video using the least possible amount of data at the cost of using a lot of CPU time to encode or decode.

H.264 is a codec optimised for distribution of video. The screen recording you made with Quicktime was initially saved using the extremely efficient H.264 compression algorithm. I looked at other video programs for the Mac, but these are wanting and importing all the family videos into my iPad to edit with Lumafusion (a great video editor) seems impractical as this is many gigabytes.You have inadvertently wandered into the murky realm of video codecs. I tried to export a movie to my iCloud account to share with my family, but that is not viewable, it wants to open it in iMovie on my phone or iPad, but then it says it cannot be used by these programs. It seems they want me to create a movie, export it as a file, and then import it into Apple TV. Most of the controls seem to be hidden and frustrating for me.

I know you can create “Previews” to movies and short clips that you can send to Facebook or YouTube, but that is not what I am looking for. It seems to be laying around and stagnant. There is minimal assistance and no real manual in the Apple Books store like they have for most of their other software. When I go into iMovie, I find myself lost trying to edit and navigate much less export. I would like to get the movies organized and view them. I have years of video that I have faithfully transitioned into the current Mac OS and now iMovie.

Imovie export mp4 not working