Reducing video size—terminology

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Lucas1948 Author

Level 1

97 points

Reducing video size—terminology

Yesterday I shot several videos with my iPhone 13 Pro Max (iOS 16.6.1). Today I'm trying to string them together in iMovie. The lot of them add up to about 15 minutes' viewing time, and I'm afraid the size of the finished product will be too large for streaming.

Well, I'm not well versed in these matters, but I see that I can export a video from iPhotos to something smaller than the original. I click File >> Export ... >> Export 1 video, and the default selection shows "720p." The choices run from 480p to 720p to 1080p to 4K. My problem is that I don't see the same kind of measurements on display in the Info sheet for the video. I see that it's "1920 x 1080, 74.6 MB, and HVEC."

So ... am I starting with a 1080p video? The 1080p that I see as a choice in the Export dialog—is that the same size as what I'm starting with? In other words, does "1920 x 1080" give me the "1080p" that I see in the Export menu?

If this were your project, would you export to 720p, or would you choose to go all the way to 480p? I'm looking to send this project up to YouTube for a few friends to see.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.6

Posted on Sep 10, 2023 10:54 AM

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Answer 1

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Whal3y

Level 2

206 points

Sep 10, 2023 11:15 AM in response to Lucas1948

TL;DR: Use 1080p, if it's too big, YouTube will make it smaller for you.

Hello,

1920x1080 does mean 1080p, so yes, that is what you are starting with.

If it were up to me, I would probably not recommend using 480p, and you would be fine with 1080p. I've seen videos as long as 30 minutes, as well as complete movies, able to have 4k (or 2160p) resolution on youtube.

the [...]p basically means the height of the video, in pixels, so 480p means that the video will be exported as 640x480 pixels, or less than 1/2 of the resoultion that you started with, and then scaled to fit the screen.

Take a look at this photo as it will give you an example of the different resolutions and basically what it does to fit on the screen. (not my image)

Hope this helps!

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Answer 2

Lucas1948 Author

Level 1

97 points

Sep 10, 2023 11:48 AM in response to Whal3y

Yes! That helps a lot. Your reply prompted me to dig into my camera settings. (Why didn't I do that earlier ... ?) I'm recording video at 1080p at 30 fps, so the videos I shot yesterday are already 1080p. My experience with editing in iMovie prompted my question. I notice that my videos play very choppily on my Mac. Playback is silky smooth on my iPhone 13, but I suppose that's because it has better hardware ... ? I'm also getting a little low on storage space on my 2016 MacBook, and I don't want to press my limits too much.

I'm thinking of going back to my iMovie project and deleting all those big video files. Then I'll go back to Photos and export all of them (one at at time) as 720p files. Then I'll go back to iMovie and import the smaller video files. Does that make sense to you?

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Reducing video size—terminology

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