Known Participant

Answered

Compressing videos to smaller file size.

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
January 25, 2018
7 replies
192999 views

Looking to get some help from the pros.

I generally like using H.264 to export my files out for viewing. They tend to be pretty widely accepted and most people can watch it.

I do have one problem when I export them through Media Encoder the files are very big. I recently finished a simple video of about 7mins that came in at almost 500mb. To me, this seems very big and it is no way convenient for web viewing as the file is just too large.

What can I do or what setting should I be using to make this more accessible to people online.

Thanks for the help in advance.

Correct answer SAFEHARBOR11

There is but one way to make a file smaller, other than making it shorter, and that is to encode using a lower bitrate. Period. If that lower bitrate has too much effect on quality, then consider also lowering the resolution, for instance from 1080p to 720p. At the same lowered bitrate, there are a lot less pixels to compress in 720p, thus it would have a better quality at same bitrate as the larger 1080p video.

Thanks

Jeff

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Евгений367000839inp

New Participant

Если работаете на ПК или ноутбуке с установленной ОС Windows 10,11, можно использовать программу из набора операционной системы КИНО И ТВ. Наведите курсор на ваше видео и нажмите правую кнопку мыши. В меню выберите Открыть с помощью. Из списка программ надо выбрать КИНО И ТВ и запустить проигрывание видео. Внизу окна программы есть значок КАРАНДАШ, если нажмете на него то сможете обрезать ваше видео. Сдвиньте ползунок на шкале времени к нужной точке и зафиксируйте. Затем в правом верхнем углу нажмите кнопку Сохранить копию, и видео сохранится в том же виде в котором вы скачали его с сервиса Zoom.

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Anonymous

Ballooning of H.264 files when exporting after re-editing is a longstanding issue. For simple cutting and merging of existing H.264/mp4 clips, I found MPEG Streamclip to work well, without ballooning the file size on export. I also found this (presumably for Mac users only) about Quicktime:
https://help.vyond.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005667026-How-do-I-merge-two-or-more-videos-in-QuickTime-
Works great for me!

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Estarno1

Participating Frequently

I just made a quick tutorial about this issue! Link below, hope this helps you out.

https://youtu.be/5j8BmjBrAyc

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thekyleshort

New Participant

Thanks so much for making the time to put this together. I'm curious if you ended up creating a workflow for editing in Premiere Pro, or happened upon someone who did manage to create a workable solution during your research. I'm currently eyeballs deep in a project involving 700+ videos of which at least half absolutely must be edited with some complex graphics, etc etc that demand Premiere Pro or similar. Thanks again and looking forward to hearing back from you!

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Estarno1

Participating Frequently

I never found a very workable solution for editing in Premiere Pro while keeping file size around the same as the original. The closest I got was using the Adaptive Low Bitrate preset, or manually setting the bitrate to the lowest. But of course, that produces poor quality video compared to the original, and still not as small of a file size.

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Yoonisadonis15360101

New Participant

Import media. Make a sequence. Right click sequence and choose Sequence settings. Change resolution to 1920x1080. Set scale to 50% in Effect Controls. Export media and set bitrate to 2. Export.

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marcybbbd

New Participant

I figured out how to do it!!!! I went from 300+ MB to 30 MB. In the Export screen after selecting the H.264 at the top and selecting the Preset you want, then select the video tab and scroll down until you get to the "Encoding Settings" section. It defaults to Hardware Encoding which makes it go faster, but increases the file size. When you choose Software encoding instead, it dramatically drops the files size to a happy 2 digit number. Hope this helps!!!

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daves71240135

Known Participant

Unfortunately, the latest version does not have this option to avoid using hardware... and still encodes at 3x the size of the original... so, why would I use a media encoder to make a file larger? Yikes!

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pathart08@yahoo.com

New Participant

Okay I want to lower the butyrate on a video export - but on Adobe premiere 2018 cc I can't find the setting - the old versions had the settings right in the video tab i believe - or I think it was Advanced tab? i don't see anything now

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SAFEHARBOR11Correct answer

Participating Frequently

There is but one way to make a file smaller, other than making it shorter, and that is to encode using a lower bitrate. Period. If that lower bitrate has too much effect on quality, then consider also lowering the resolution, for instance from 1080p to 720p. At the same lowered bitrate, there are a lot less pixels to compress in 720p, thus it would have a better quality at same bitrate as the larger 1080p video.

Thanks

Jeff

tklow

Known Participant

I've seen this suggestion in many places, but you know, it doesn't really resolve the issue.

I regularly have to edit webinar recordings from Zoom webinar. They are about an hour long 2650x1440 frames witih reasonable quality and the files are about 70-90 megs when I get them. Certainly not suitable for a movie, but for a webinar with slides, it's very reasonable: the frame size is nice and large, and you can read the text on the slides just fine. The audio quality is clear enough for the purpose.

But, if I do ANY kind of edit in premiere pro and try to output again, I typically get a file of 900 megs down to as low as 750 megs. That's about 10 times the original size. Now, if it's just about bitrate, explain why this is the case when I choose the lowest possible bitrate setting (0.19) and the lowest frame rate (10). I'm using H.264. Obviously, the output file size is just not acceptable. When I have a folder with multiple sessions and most of them are under 100 megs then I have a file that is 750 megs and all I did was blur out a single word on a slide, or add a quick title, or in some cases, I just trimmed a little off the front without making any changes or additions.

I've been battling this issue for a couple of years and really haven't found a suitable resolution. I now use other software to trim my videos and save without re-encoding, but this doesn't help if I have to make a small edit. There must be some way to get PP to output roughly the same file size as my original files?

the only thing I found that works is to radically reduce the frame size, but then I have a much smaller video in which the slides cannot be read, and the file size is still 2-3 times the original size.

Of course, this issue is compounded by the grossly inaccurate estimated output size. It's not unsual for PP to esimate my output size at under 100 megs then output a file 8 or 9 times that size.

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SAFEHARBOR11

Participating Frequently

What format are the original small clips from the webinar - what is the file extension on them? Maybe run MediaInfo on your file and post a shot of the results here.

They might be a proprietary format that is optimized for screen capture, which is meant for slides that are static most of the time, which could make the file size very economical. Versus Premiere being set up to export VIDEO with constant motion and changes.

Thanks

Jeff

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