How to Reduce the File Size of Videos in Various Ways

28 - Feb - 2019

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Hello friends, I hope you all are doing great. In today's tutorial, I am going to show you How to Reduce the File Size of Videos in Various Ways. Videos are known to have large file sizes that can range into several gigabytes. The longer the video and the higher its quality, the larger its file size tends to be. The fact that videos are so large can pose a lot of problems. Not only will they take up more storage space, but transferring them can present more of a challenge as well. That is why it can be helpful to know how to reduce the file size of your videos, in a number of different ways.

How to Reduce the File Size of Videos in Various Ways

Let's have a look at How to Reduce the File Size of Videos in Various Ways. All these ways are mentioned below in detail:

Transcoding the video codec

Most videos are already compressed in some fashion, but not all video codecs are equal when it comes to the efficiency of their compression. In general newer codecs are able to compress video data more effectively, and so you may want to transcode to one with better compression. The only caveat is that newer codecs aren’t as widely supported, so you will need to check that the device or platform your video is to be played on does support it.

At very least you should transcode videos to H.264 as it is almost universally supported. If it is an option you can transcode to H.265 (HEVC) to reduce the file size even more, but it is not nearly as widely supported. The main advantage of this option is that you will be able to reduce the file size of your videos without affecting their quality.

Adjusting the video bitrate

By definition the video bitrate is the amount of data that the video can use each second. That directly affects the file size, which is essentially the video bitrate multiplied by its duration. Lowering the video bitrate will let you reduce the file size of the videos as much as you want. However it will affect the video quality as well, and compression artifacts will appear if you lower the bitrate too much. The optimal bitrate for videos depends on several factors, such as the video codec, resolution, and frame rate.

Extracting short clips from videos

As you can imagine this option won’t reduce the size of the overall video – but it will let you end up with a smaller-sized video. It is only useful in situations where you are interested in small parts from much longer videos. By extracting short clips from your videos and saving them separately, you will end up with videos that have significantly smaller file sizes. The exact difference will depend on the length of the clips you’re extracting compared to the length of the original video.

Keep in mind that none of the options listed above are mutually exclusive, and you can use them in combination with one another if necessary. For example you could convert a H.264 video in MKV to MP4 with H.265 (HEVC) using Movavi Video Converter, then reduce the bitrate, and extract the clips that you want from your video. As you can see the exact options you’ll want to use will depend on your specific circumstances. It is ‘best’ to transcode the video without affecting its quality – though that may not always be an option that is available to you. If it isn’t (or if you need to reduce the file size further), reducing the bitrate or extracting short clips are your best bets.