I'm working on a pen video but the list has really long characters and spans the length of 4000. Ive tried to do list to variable converters but they make a really long variable that wont save ether. does anyone know of any way to shorten the list without deleting items in the list?

What do you mean by not saving?

like when I finish the project a sign comes up saying project failed to save. with trial and error I deduced that it was the list contained too much data for scratch's data base to handle

You mean the list has long items and 4000 or more? What do you mean by long items if so?

the length of the list is 4000 but each segment of this list is over 80,000 characters long

Not sure what Scratch's data limits are but I'm not surprised that might exceed them. If each character only needs one byte (might be two) that's 80K for each segmant and over 320 megabytes of data.

Ik thats why list to var seemed like an easier option but the resulting variable is too long even for scratch to handle

Most programming languages have their limits. Given what Scratch is trying to provide you may just have to accept it is not suitable for what you're trying to do.

ok I guess