Optimising the videos you upload
Download and install Handbrake
Use this application to optimise your videos. It has some useful included presets as well as offering you control over the level of optimisation to allow you to juggle the pros & cons of quality vs file size.
Sizes
The length of your video is a good indicator for your file size you should be aiming for.
- For videos around 30 seconds aim for 3-6mb.
- For videos around 1 minute aim for 6-10mb
For anything over 1 minute use the above as a guide, however to improve page load and the ability for the content to stream to the user consider only uploading small videos that are well optimised or, using a third party service like Vimeo & Youtube instead as they are more capable of streaming longer content. A change to Vimeo or Youtube may come with other restrictions and additional costs so best to chat with us first if you fee like this is necessary.
A series of settings will help reduce the size your videos. You’ll need to edit a few settings, let it encode, and then check the result. Each setting you turn on could reduce the quality of the video, keep that in mind.
Start with a preset
To start with we recommend loading the video and applying the ‘Gmail Large 3 Minutes preset 720p30’
Make sure ‘Web Optimised’ is clicked
Click ‘Add to Queue’ and then ‘Start’
If the result is under or around the sizes outlined above, then no need to do anything more.
If it’s still not small enough or if the quality isn’t crisp enough
If the video quality or file size is not what you are after then we can look at the following.
- Go to the Video tab and adjust the Constant Quality range slider- increasing this will make the file larger and better quality, decreasing will reduce file size and possibly the quality. Increase or decrease by a few steps at a time and test. The range should sit between 18-28.
- Alternatively you can enable ‘Average Bitrate’ and adjust this value and test
Remove Audio
If your video is a background video only you should remove the audio track. Click on the Audio tab an on each sound channel change the dropdown to ‘None’
