Video file compression can be incredibly beneficial for your video marketing campaigns & goals when uploading videos online, sharing with business clients, or attaching it to an email. Compressed videos minimize bandwidth usage, upload, and download speeds and reduce buffering during online streaming.
However, if you are a beginner in video editing and compression, you must learn how to make video smaller and the different parameters to avoid downscaling the video quality.
Video Compression – How Does it Work?
Video compression employs codec algorithms to automatically eliminate repetitive noise or identical frames from a video file while helps shrink its size.
The size of the video depends on three factors –
- Resolution – It is the number of pixels characterized by a horizontal x vertical measurement (1080p HD video has a resolution of 1920 x 1080).
- Bitrate – This parameter determines the amount of information transmitted for every second of a video and is recorded in megabits per second (Mbps).
- Encoding – Encoding comprises the codec (the code that helps compress a video) and its container or file type (AVI or MP4). Certain file types have more efficient codecs, such as MP4 files whose compression is more efficient than FLV files.
The Role of Codecs in Video Compression
Codecs are the universal codes employed by various file formats to shrink a video file. Some video codecs include MPEG4, ProRes, Quicktime, or WMV. These codecs automatically compress data when a file gets saved in a specific format or file container.
Video codecs perform lossy compression as they exclude some file data to shrink the file size, leading to video quality issues. However, with advanced codecs like HEVC, it is viable to achieve lossless compression because of their data retention qualities that prevent video quality degradation.
However, next-generation video codecs, including HEVC (or H.265), Versatile Video Coding (VVC), Essential Video Coding (EVC), and many more offer highly efficient data compressions that significantly minimize the impact on video quality.
Significance of Video Compression
The massive video files, if left uncompressed, can block networks and typically do not get delivered without employing robust networking technology that includes UDP solutions or saving and transferring files traditionally on a hard drive.
While UDP solutions are fast, they are also expensive. Traditional hard drives are slow-paced, and uploading such massive files on them puts your content at risk of corruption.
The points mentioned below depict the importance of compressing large video file sizes when transferring or uploading online –
- Shrinking large videos leads to less occupation of disk space and leaves more room for other files. This lets you save more files in the same storage that would have gotten occupied by enormously-sized uncompressed videos.
- Since disk drives become slower as their capacity fills up, file reading and writing become significantly faster on smaller-sized files.
- Traditional hard drives do not deliver fast transfer speeds, especially on larger files. Video compression streamlines file transferring by reducing the file size.
Besides understanding the significance of video compression, you must also opt for decent video compressor to enjoy greater versatility while editing and compression.
Final Words
If you love to shoot and edit long videos or are a vlogger, you must learn about video compression if you wish to share your talent with the world. It is crucial that you balance all three parameters appropriately to avoid degrading video quality.
This guide can help you understand the fundamentals of video compression and why you need it if your content exceeds hundreds of MBs or falls in the GBs range.
