Quote:
Originally Posted by DCCougar
I have some experience in amateur audio recording, but I'm just now getting into video. I took a 39 second video on my Canon Rebel T3i, and it amounted to 237 MB! Is that typical? Should I care? That's with the resolution set to 1920x1080 and 24 fps. Obviously I could get a smaller file size with a smaller resolution setting, but do I want to do that? I guess the key question is, can one compress a video file similar to how a .wav can be compressed to an mp3 (or m4a)? Or does one just have to deal with these huge file sizes if one's going to be messing around with video?
Come to think of it, I did import this video into iMovie, stripped off its soundtrack, and added a .wav that I had, and the whole thing ended up 99 MB, so iMovie obviously compressed it. It went from an .MOV to an .mp4. I don't think I reduced the resolution setting in iMovie. (I guess that answers my own question?)
Anyway, is there anything I'm not "getting" about these super-large file sizes for videos?
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There are levels of compression in movie formats just like MP3, JPG, et al, i.e., any "lossy" compression can be dialed in, though in many movie editing apps it's usually limited. You can use separate tools to fiddle with that, if you want.
With many of the videos I upload to YouTube, I use 720p. It used to be called HD, but with 4k taking over I think it's an unlabeled resolution between SD and 1080 in YT these days. For home stuff, especially if you've done any cropping of 1080 video, it's going to look fine on most phones (IMO/IME). I only use 1080 when I don't do any cropping or if I see some artifact of the 720 down-res that goes away when I render in the original 1080. (Sometimes there are issues with that, too, if you are are changing underlying format or compression.)