For more security, you of course can encode the sha512 hash in a format other than hex in order to let those 64 bytes be fewer characters. The hex encoding is only one of many encodings.
But the main point is that the solution to needing to store a shorter value is not to use a weaker hashing algorithm, but to truncate the result.
This is the reason that sha-512/256 exists as a truncated sha-512 even though sha-256 already existed.