File Size Humongous when making videos - What to do?

1

I haven’t seen this question come up, and it could be useful for anyone wanting to post a video to the Covers thread or elsewhere. So I was taking video clips, mostly of bands playing a song, so, around 4-6 minutes in length on my iPhone. A friend was doing this too on his Android, and the same thing happens.

The clips are HUGE in size - around 400-600 megabytes. This size makes them unwieldy to send to anyone, upload/download (to a cloud like Dropbox, or elsewhere), and most email doesn’t allow attachments that big.

What do you all do to make this work, or at least more manageable? I can move the file to a computer/laptop, if one is handy. But it still has big file issues, takes up space, runs into limits. For anyone that’s uploaded video, what’s your solution, or do you just deal with it, or send it to YouTube, or something else?

5 Likes
2

you have to compress the video, it’s exactly the same thing than making a MP3 from a WAV uncompressed audio file. you can compress to AVI or MP4. I use VideoPad but any video editor do this. to give an idea, with the settings I use, a full song clip in HD 720p is about 30 to 50 Mb, depending on the song’s length.

6 Likes
3

So is this only possible once you’ve transferred the file off your phone, onto a desktop or laptop? Also, what compression program do you use, or do you use one of those websites that does it for you?

3 Likes
4

I suppose there must be some apps to do this on the phone ? but I do the compression after the editing, on the computer. I use VideoPad but there are a lot of other video editors and they all do compression / export to AVI or MP4.

3 Likes
5

I do all my video work on a windows PC as well.
I use Camtasia by https://www.techsmith.com/
this is pro level software, and can be complex, and does come with a price tag. A lot of people use Vegas Pro, that’s quite popular as well.

4 Likes
6

For sending large files elswhere, I use File Convoy.

Unlimited file size, no registration/sign up, and totally free.

Basically you upload to File Convoy and send/post a link for others to download (link stays active for up to 21 days).

Obviously the bigger the file size the longer the upload/download time.

Not sure this will help in what you are looking to do, but it’s a handy thing to know about anyway.

4 Likes
7

I use Handbrake

7 Likes
8

Go to Camera prefs and make sure you are not capturing at 4k.

Mine defaulted to 1080p/30fps, even that is overkill for online video. I’d recommend 720p/30fps. Should work out to about 40MB/minute.

Then you can compress that in a video editor as @terb mentioned.

5 Likes
9

Cool, this is bound to help. I just found it. On an iPhone, go to Settings → Camera → Record Video. Then, use this setting, unless you just want really high quality video for some reason.

Great sites/tools for video editing, sharing, and compression, everyone!

3 Likes