Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today, I want to show you how you can make your video files smaller,
so they take up less space. This way you can put a video directly into your PowerPoint presentation.
You can upload a video to Discord. I mean, heck, you can even attach it to an email. I mean, it's
theoretically possible, but please don't do that. Here I have two almost identical looking videos
playing side by side, but one of them takes up 167 megabytes and the other one is only 63 megabytes.
The difference is that one of them uses a highly efficient compression algorithm. And we'll look at
how you can use this on your videos too. First, we are going to download a free and open-source
video transcoder called Handbrake. You can get to it up above or also down below in the description.
Handbrake can do a lot. Not only can you reduce the size of your video files,
but you can also use it to crop, resize, or even rotate your videos, and it does a whole lot more
than just that. On the homepage, click on the big red download button. You won't miss it.
Once you finish installing, you'll now see a cocktail and a pineapple icon on your desktop.
These developers sure do know how to have some fun. Let's click on that to launch the app. Once
you launch the app, it'll prompt you to drag and drop in an individual video file, or you can drag
and drop an entire folder in that contains many video files. Over here on the side, I have an
individual video file that takes up 167 megabytes, and I want to make it a lot smaller than that.
Here I'll simply drag and drop that video file over into the app. Right up above, you'll see your
video file name, and this is now referred to as the source. This is the file that we are going to
transcode. If say you want to change your source, in the top left-hand corner, you can click on open
source, and that brings us back to that initial screen. I want to transcode this file, so I'll
click on cancel. Right here, I can choose which title I want to transcode and also the angle. Now
this is typically the case of say you have a DVD or a Blu-ray, but in my case I just have one video
clip, so I'll move forward with this. Down below, you'll see several different tabs, and each one of
them has many different available settings, and we can use these to reduce the video file size,
but there are a lot of settings, and it might feel a little bit daunting. If you don't want to mess
with any of this, you can also use some presets that come with Handbrake. Let's say that you
really want to email this video file as an attachment. Here when I click through the presets,
there's an option for that, and it'll ensure that my video file size is less than 25 megabytes. Or
let's say that I really want to watch this video on my tablet. There's a setting for that that will
reduce the size, but also still ensure quality for that device. If you go with one of these presets,
you're pretty much done. For now, I'm going to go forward with the default of 1080p fast,
and then let's take a look at what some of these settings are. The first tab contains a summary
of the various settings. If you're ever unsure of what a setting does, you can simply hover over it,
and it'll show a tool tip that explains what that setting does. Right up here, you can choose
the format, and you'll probably recognize some of these containers. I'll select MP4.
On the dimension tab here, you can flip a video. You can also rotate a video. So, let's say you
record a video on your phone, and it's in the wrong orientation. You could simply rotate it.
You can also crop a video. So, let's say you have those black bars on the top and on the bottom of
your video. You could cut those out. Here in the middle, you can also adjust the resolution. In
the top left-hand corner, you'll see the original or the source resolution. And if you lower that,
fewer pixels will make up your image, which can help you save some space. Lastly, you can also add
a border to your video. Moving on to the next tab, there's one called filters, and here you
have a number of different options. Once again, you can hover over them to see what they do.
One of the more interesting options, down at the very bottom, you can turn your video into
grayscale or basically black and white. Moving on to the video tab, here we can choose an encoder,
and this is going to do the magic of compressing your video so it takes up less space. Within this
dropdown, there are many different options to choose from. So, which one should you pick? Well,
most of the presets use either H.264 or H.265, and H.265 is the successor to H.264. It's basically
newer and it's more efficient. And what that means is you'll get a smaller file size with better
quality. So, in general, you should always go with H.265, although there is one potential downside.
Not as many services yet except H.265, and just as an example, I tried uploading a video to
Twitter in H.265 and they rejected it, but then they accepted H.264. So, you'll just have to see
where the video file is accepted. You'll also notice for H.264 and H.265, you have different
options like X.264, and you also have NVIDIA NV encode. So, which one should you choose? Well,
one of these refers to the software doing the encoding. Another one refers to your graphics
card doing the encoding. In general, I haven't found that much of a difference between these,
so you can experiment with them, but here I'm going to select the software encoding.
Under the encoder, you can choose the frame rate, and this is how many still images appear every
single second in your video. I'm going to select same as source. Over on the right-hand side, here
you can choose constant quality, or you can choose average bitrate, and I would highly recommend
going with constant quality. This is where you can define the quality level that you want,
and then Handbrake will adjust the bitrate to match that quality. I would only go with average
bitrate if you have a specific reason to go with that, but in general Handbrake highly recommends
constant quality. Underneath constant quality, here you can define what the quality level
is. And when you hover over, you'll see some recommendations based on the type of content.
So if you want high definition content, here they recommend between 20 and 23. I'm going to select
23. Now obviously the higher the quality, the more space your video file will take, and the lower
quality, the less space your video file will take. Down below, you can also set the encoder speed,
and here the turtle wins the race. The more time the encoder has, it can ensure better image
quality and also smaller file size. You just have to be willing to wait a little bit longer for the
encode to complete. Moving on to the next tab, we have audio, and here just like with video,
you can choose the codec for your audio. I'll leave it set to the default of AAC.
Here I can also select the bitrate. The lower the bitrate, the less space it'll take,
but also the worse the quality will be. And with higher bitrates, it's the opposite. The higher the
quality and the more space that it'll consume. Now in general, audio has a pretty minimal impact on
the overall file size. So, I'll leave these set as is. Lastly, you can also adjust the subtitles
and the chapters. Now if you went through and you customized all of these different settings,
you'll probably want to save them. Right up here, you can save these as a new preset.
That way you can simply go back to it again in the future. With all of these settings,
it might not be completely clear how it's going to impact how your video looks.
And unfortunately, encoding takes a bit of time, so it's a little bit of guesswork, but luckily
Handbrake includes a preview. When you click on that, it'll show your video and you could just
encode, say 10 seconds of it. You can then view it to see if you're satisfied with it. If you're not,
you could simply close it out, adjust the settings again, and then you could preview once again. So
this helps you save time to make sure that the settings that you've chosen are optimal.
With all of that now out of the way, we need to choose where we want to save this file. Down at
the very bottom, you can type in a destination, or you can browse to someplace on your computer.
Here you'll see the file extension. Mine says .mp4, but you might also see .m4v.
That is the same as .mp4, except it also supports DRM capabilities. If you don't want that,
you could simply type in .mp4. If you want to set .mp4 as the default moving forward, go up to
the tools menu, then click on preferences, output files, and then here you could change it to .mp4.
With all of that now set, we can start encoding. Right up here, I’ll click on start encode. Down
here, you'll see a progress bar. Once it's all done, your video file should be a lot smaller,
and you should also have comparable quality. All right, well, let me know down below in
the comments, were you able to successfully reduce the file size of your video? To watch
more videos like this one, please consider subscribing. I'll see you in the next video.