File sizes can quickly add up when you're documenting your work. Fortunately there are some handy tricks, tools and settings to make your video documentation ready to share with coaches, other students and clients.
The exact setting will probably change based on your video editor of choice, but some of the terminology like resolution, bitrate and codec will still be the same across the board.
<aside> ⚠️ If your two minute video is already 750mb or bigger, you clearly need video compression. Try to keep your video file size under 150MB
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Video Length Describes how long your video will be in playback seconds / minutes / hours
Frame Rate How many frames are in one second of the video (frames per second = fps). A higher frame rate (e.g. 120fps) means one second of video consists out of 120 individual pictures. The standard frame rate for most videos are 30fps
Resolution How many pixels are in one frame of the video (e.g. 1920 pixel x 1080 pixel). Common standards are 720p (HD Ready), 1080p (FullHD) and 4K.
Bitrate Every digital good is build up with bits and bytes. The bitrate controls how much data one second of video is allowed to take up. More bits equal a bigger file size, and a bigger bitrate results in a bigger file size. The bitrate can be constant or variable. Variable is preferable in most cases as it allows the compressor to use as little data as possible.
Codec Video codecs compress and decompress digital videos. Compression makes the video significantly smaller while only compromising a tiny bit of quality. Different companies and different use cases have different codecs, but the most common one is the H264 video codec.
HandBrake is an open-source tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. It is available for all platforms and is definitely handy to have, since it has many Built-in Device Presets and you don't need an Adobe subscription to use it
The ITD TAs have had good experiences when using the “Discord” presets 💪🏼
This article describes quite thoroughly how different settings will influence your video outcome when exporting it with the Adobe Media Encoder
Video Encoding With Adobe Media Encoder
Instead of sending your video via email or another sharing service, it is also possible to upload a video to YouTube, set it to private and then send out the link.
Another advantage? The YouTube compression algorithm is pretty great, so you can also download the final result again and have a wonderfully small video.