Though I’ve done a healthy amount of video production in my past, I haven’t been involved in the big online video push of the last two years, from a producer standpoint. As a viewer, it’s never been simpler. I haven’t worried about video codecs in ages.
Last week, I finally got around to uploading a video. Some friends and I create We Were Aces: A Che Gomez Wifflementary back in 2002. We always wanted to put it online, but getting it small enough and viewable by most browsers was a huge hurdle. For five years, it sat around on a DVD, but now you can see it here.
Producing web video, like watching it, is easier than ever before. But it’s still pretty hard. Since my copy is on a DVD, I had to find software that could extract a video file. I felt like a investment banker walking into a back alley looking for some smack, trudging the dirty web. One tutorial placed “home movie” in quotes, assuming I was ripping a hollywood movie. I chuckled, figuring I was one of few who was actually extracting my own work.
Finally, I remembered HandBrake, recommended by a couple friends in the past. It’s about as easy as it gets right now. Still, there are a million settings, none of which seem to actually affect quality of file size. And it still made me feel dirty.
I didn’t know CCTV could be so interesting. Nice video!
HandBrake has a setting for “Target size (MB)”. I haven’t messed with it, though. Did you play with that?
Yeah, and I stopped the output process when it was 50% done and the output file was more than double my target size already.
But it worked wonders for what I wanted, which was to get at my own video.
Huh, okay then. I know that you can muck around with the Average bitrate, but I can’t seem to find the tutorial I used to get myself started.
This one seems to be pretty good, though, and has a section on getting the file size down: http://www.macinstruct.com/node/109
Specifically, it says that you can fiddle with quality (which is what Average Bitrate is)(and c’mon, this is YouTube) and the audio to get filesize down.
I wonder if the Target Size option just rips it as high as it wants and compresses it to hell, which would explain it taking up so many resources.
(Hi, Adam!)