Timestamps:
0:39 – Question from Laura Chambers
1:13 – Archival Video VS Portable Video
Transcript
Hey, everybody, it’s Craig Lillard with Clipscribe. I really want to tell you about some of the new features that we have, we have so many new features that I feel like our users don’t know about just because we haven’t had this type of opportunity to go into them in-depth and I think it’s really going to be cool as you figure out some of the things you can do with Clipscribe, that you’re not aware, that you can do those things.
So, today I’m going to answer a question from one of our users. So, Laura Chambers posted, and let me bring up her question here. She posted in this group a few days ago. thank you Laura for posting.
Recommended File Compressor
One of the first questions here and your question was, “What file compressor would you recommend using before I upload my video?” This is a great question and one that I kind of wish more people would ask, so, why is that? Well, let’s talk about two different types of video files. You’ve got what I call archival video and you have portable video files now, archival videos are uncompressed videos. Just think you go and shoot a video, for example, and all this kind of starts with professional video. So, somebody goes out, they use their professional gear, they shoot a video and they’re going to shoot it on the best possible equipment. They want like no compression. They want ideally a raw video file because they want to be able to keep that in their archive. They want to be able to use it over and over again and they just want the very best quality and they recognize that this is going to be stored on a hard drive. This isn’t something they’re going to upload to the internet or to the web. It’s not going to be streamed. This is their archive version of the video.
Archival Version
What you do not want to upload to Clipscribe is the archival version. You don’t want to upload your uncompressed video to Clipscribe. Here’s a couple of reasons for that:
The main reason is, it’s just going to cause you grief, okay, it’s going to make your life much more difficult and it’s not going to really benefit you. Let me explain why that is when you upload that full, like one gigabyte, two-gigabyte video file, and if you upload like a 4k file like we get 4k but we don’t export in 4k. Right there you’re uploading a video file that you’re not going to get a 4k file out in the end. So what happens is, is that it’s going to take you a lot longer to upload these uncompressed video files. Okay? and secondly, our system has to crunch through those files. So when we make your finished video it’s going to take much much longer than it should to make your video.
Portable Video
Every single time you click to make and you render your finished video, it’s going to take you much more like 3-4 times longer than it would take if you uploaded a portable file. So the portable file is a slightly compressed video file. Okay? it is and I say slightly because I think people think, well, I don’t want, I want the best quality possible and you can still have great quality video in a portable video file, but it’s just made to be portable.
Let me give you an example of a codec that would be an archival codec so that could be like an animation codecs. Quick time has a code called animation and it’s completely uncompressed and it’s gonna be an enormous file versus an h.264 and if you don’t know what that is, that is really probably the most popular video codec right now, if you see, if you have a video that’s a .mp4 that is most likely the h.264 coding.
If you’re watching a video online on Youtube, Facebook, it is very much most likely the h.264 codec so it’s a high-quality codec but it’s small and a lot of times people say “Craig the file size is not big. How can this be good quality?” and I always say, look, back in the 60s, something like this would be filled out three rooms full, something that had this much processing power and that’s now in the palm of your hand and really would be hardly any of this processing power and fill up a rule for so bigger does not mean better, especially today. So just because your final size is smaller, it doesn’t mean that your video quality is necessarily going to be less. It means that we’ve gotten much better at creating videos that are high quality at lower file size so you want to upload a portable, you do want to, you know, I say lightly compress your video before uploading it to Clipscribe.
How do you do that? Well, that’s really what Laura’s question is here and it really depends on where your video is coming from. Let me tell you some ways not to do that. Okay, if you shoot a video on your phone and you’re shooting it at full resolution or full quality and then you upload it straight to us, it’s probably going to be pretty uncompressed, and in an iPhone, you can actually go into your video settings and you can choose an h.264 video and you can choose to shoot in that. or you can use a third-party app which is what I recommend doing there’s one I use called movie pro and it lets you go in and choose h.264 and so whether you’re on Samsung, whether your iPhone, you can do that, make sure that you’re choosing a codec that is going to lightly compress your video. but if you’re uploading that straight uncompressed file, then that’s going to be part of your problem there.
Laura was asked about Samsung, not a Samsung aficionado, but I would go into your settings and look at what options it gives you as far as your camera and you just want to avoid anything that says, uncompressed or perfect quality or something like that and feel free to send me those settings and I will, I will gladly look at them. one of the things that I would do with my iPhone is I would shoot my video and then I would put it into the iMovie software on my iPhone and I would export it and the reason I would do that is that the video that iPhone was shooting by default. It was so non-portable that sometimes I couldn’t even transfer it to my computer. It would mess everything up. It wouldn’t make it through and so I would always pre convert it to an h.264 just using the iPhone software. I give you another example of this. if you’re a mac user and use iMovie, one of the settings on there, I think it’s called the best setting it’s going to export a file that’s going to be four times the size as it should be. and I believe the codec it uses is called Pro Rest so you don’t want to use it.
Sometimes the very, very best setting is not the setting that you want to use. I think the other setting there is called high and you just want to avoid that pro rest codec. It’s another, it’s an archival video codec and it’s going to make your video 3-4 times the size really what it should be. So from a file-size standpoint, if your video is over a gigabyte and it’s less than 30 minutes long, it’s probably it’s very very lightly if compressed at all, it’s probably uncompressed and you should pre-compress it.
If it’s 4k poured it down to just HD I mean these are things that are going to save you time save you frustration and just make it easier and you’re going to make your video file portable. Now one more comment on this and this is another, I’m sorry, I’m dropping on this iPhone stuff, but iPhone is shooting in a format called HDR as of late and even when you go into the settings, it has HDR, and then it has h.264 and it calls the HDR file, I can’t remember the exact phrase but it doesn’t play well with others. okay, that’s my paraphrase of it and then it says the h.264 is a file that’s going to work on many devices and we’ve had issues with uploading these HDR files because they won’t play properly in chrome.
They won’t play in your browser, right, the color is off. So another example of why making sure you’re shooting in h.264 or you’re converting over to h.264 before uploading to us, it’s going to save you more trouble there, and your videos are just going to be like I said more portable, they’re going to play well with all kinds of devices and of course they’re going to play well with our system and everything else.
So if you have questions, like obviously, I’m an iPhone person here, but if you have specific questions about android or Samsung, just send me a screenshot of the settings and I’ll check them out and let you know what you can do to kind of make things easier for you and what you recommended settings on there are as well, so keep the questions coming and I look forward to answering more of them, and thanks for watching everybody. I’ll see on another video here pretty soon.