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Hi There, this is Matt Gorney - I'm the Coordinator of Digital Media Services for Ithaca College.
I'm going to show you how to quickly reduce the file size of your video on a mac. It's
important to reduce the file size of your videos for a few reasons. One is that small
file sizes are easy to copy share and upload via the internet. The other is that you may
be uploading to a place that has limits on file sizes or you may be given a quota for
space - and it's important to work within those quotas. Trust me, it will make your
life easier!
So, I'm going to focus on a free application called Video Monkey. You can download the
application from www.videomonkey.org Remember this is for the mac only.
So I've downloaded and unzipped the application and I can simply double-click and run this
without an installation process.
I have a video file here called fountainsdaytime.mov and it shows the beautiful fountains here
at Ithaca College. The problem is that the file size is quite large. 302 megabytes and
I need to make that smaller.
So, using Video Monkey I'm going to drag that file into the application's window. Then,
I'm going to select my output. There are a variety of options including windows media
video but MP4 is a pretty universal format for Mac and PC and this is one of the formats
that Sakai will accept. So I'm join to choose that.
Then, there are a few other selections here - I'm going to keep encoding only - the encoding
speed is normal and I want to keep this "Limit output params to input" box checked. Let's
also keep that H.264 box checked in order to make sure that this video is encoded that
way. This makes it useable with the most devices and computer systems possible.
Next, there's a quality slider where you can choose the level of compression that you want.
As you move the slider, you can see what the estimated file sizes are - here - as well
as what Video Monkey wants to make for the frame size.
File size and frame size are the two things you want to pay attention to when reducing
the size of a video. The smaller you go the smaller the file. This also means that the
quality of the video will be reduced.
You want to find the sweet spot where the size is reduced, but without greatly affecting
quality. It can be tricky but Video Monkey is set by default to make it super easy and
most times you can simply drag it in and hit start and your video will look good and you
will see file size savings.
So, after hitting start, Video Monkey made an MP4 file and saved it in the same location
that the original video was in - the desktop
So let's go ahead and look at it. It looks good and you can see that we now have a file
that's 1.70 MB - a huge file savings from 300 megabytes
So this is how you can quickly reduce the file size of a video on a mac using Video
Monkey.
Thanks for watching.