Compression formulas for e-mail

[David Fortin]

I’m not at the office right now, but I used SQUEEZE to take a one minute video and make it into a Windows Media File for sending in emails. I got it down to about 1MB with the client being somewhat happy with the results. 5 minutes is a lot of video. You will have to experiment a little to see what you can live with. Audio quality made a pretty big difference in file size when I did it. To go from sounding “like it was underwater” to the audio being okay added 20 to 30% to the file I made.

Word of warning!!!! If this is for a client, you will spend many hours trying to get something they will be happy with. They’ll have a hard time understanding why you can’t take SD video that is around 1 GB in size and reduce it to 300 KB!!!!!!!

You may be better off with an MPEG-4 file, which I haven’t used. I’m sure someone else will have some words of wisdom for you. If I end up at the office later today, and no one else has responded, I will send you the settings that I used.

Good luck,

David

Dual 2.5 G5 {OS 10.4.5}
4.5 GB RAM
FCP 5.0.4
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL
DeckLink SP
ATTO ExpressPCI UL4S
Medea Video Raid RT320
Sony UVW-1800
Pansonic AG-DV2500
Media Cleaner Pro 6
Squeeze 4.2 (PC)
ViewSonic 19″ LCD
Optiquest 21″ CRT
Bella EZ Keyboard

[Chris Poisson]

Ashley,

As was said, 5 minutes is a lot for an e-mail, depending on the max size file a person can recieve.

Short of buying Squeeze or Compression Master though, this may be some help. Following these guidelines, you may be able to get it small enough.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/qt_movies_from_fcp.html

Have a wonderful day.

[Arnie Schlissel]

A lot of ISP’s mail servers won’t deliver mail with attachments that are over a certain size. For some, the size may be as low as 1 meg or as large as 5, it varies with the service.

You might want to try sending the file over iChat, AIM or Skype. I recently had a client send me some files from AIM on his side him to iChat on mine. It worked pretty well & was easy as pie.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Ben Holmes]

That’s interesting about AIM and iChat. Must try that. The other option is to set up an ftp site and host your own video for download, or mirror it from a webpage.

H264 Mpeg4 is the best format you can use for your requirements, at present. A Five minute video will still yield a pretty big file size, however, at decent quality. Best advice I can give is to reduce the frame size first – 320×240 is the absolute maximum. Keep the audio bitrate low – it does help.

However – a five minute video into corporate email don’t go, unless you crush it beyond recognition. Look for an alternative method of filesharing, not more compression. One think you might try is a website called http://www.youtube.com. It allows you to post a video free, and some of them are fairly long. I’ve only used it for personal use, but I guess it could be used for client viewing, maybe…

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS and FCP specialists
Current Mac systems All Dual 2.7Ghz with Kona 2 and Digital Voodoo cards, 6Gb Ram, Sapphire, SCSI320 Medea and Huge Arrays.

FCP projects include Sky TV coverage of the Ryder Cup and US Open Golf – Live OB specialists. Edit/slomo vehicle.
http://www.editec.co.uk

[Kevin Monahan]

Never email a video file.
Download always – always – always

Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com

[Chris Poisson]

Kevin,

Why not?

Have a wonderful day.

[Kevin Monahan]

Well, I agree with Arnie.

A lot of ISP’s mail servers won’t deliver mail with attachments that are over a certain size. For some, the size may be as low as 1 meg or as large.

Why muck with someone else’s email account?

Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com

[Neil Ryan]

[Kevin Monahan] “Download always – always – always”

But from where, Kevin?
Are you hosting your own ftp site or what ..?
We use Streamload.com a lot for this, but we find their site very temperamental.
We find that it cannot be trusted for tight deadlines, but is ideal for ongoing download purposes.

What do you do?

[Arnie Schlissel]

You can use a chat program, as I mentioned above. Or just get set up your own website with enough space to post files yourself. My website costs me less than $100 a year for 15GB of space & 250GB/month of bandwidth.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com