Top 3 Ways To Compress Your Vacation Videos Without Losing Quality

The world is a beautiful place. This is something many of us seem to forget due to the ravages of the pandemic over the past few years. Sealed away beyond the evil of health problems, COVID and travel restrictions, vacations and holidays are now distant memories. If those memories take the form of videos, and you want to store them for posterity without them taking up much space on your device, then this article is what’s been missing from your life!

There is only so much space available for storing everything you want, and you should never have to compromise with your memories. With a good MKV-to-MP4 converter online, you will never have to consider doing this ever again! In this article, we will tell you a few ways you can compress your travel videos without breaking a sweat. Let’s get started!

Converting Codecs

You can reduce the file size of a travel video while keeping its quality by changing the codec used to encode it to one that has superior compression capabilities. When converting between codecs, the exact amount of compression achieved will vary depending on the original codec and the codec that you're converting to - and newer codecs are frequently far better at compression.

Just keep in mind that the video codec you convert to has to be readable by your phone, or else you may have trouble playing it. It is recommended that you convert the codec to H.264. If your device is more recent, it may support H.265 – which can lower the file size of even H.264 videos by up to 50% – if your device is capable of doing so.

Reduce The Video’s Bitrate

If you reduce the bitrate of the journey video, it will reduce the video’s size manifold, but the quality of the video will suffer as a result. In general, the more you reduce the bitrate, the worse the quality will be, and compression artifacts may appear as a result.

As a result, you should proceed with caution when using this option, gradually lowering the bitrate while monitoring the video quality to ensure that it does not decline excessively.  It requires a slightly more hands-on approach, but it pays off in the end.

Turn Full-Length Videos into Clips

This might seem obvious in retrospect, but it’s not something you might have considered. You can highlight the most important and meaningful clips of the travel video–that you know for sure you’ll be watching over and over–and save it in a separate document. Making short clips like this ensures you have the most important parts of the video with you always while also erasing the stress of worrying about running out of space.

This can be done very easily with the help of free video editing tools and software. There are a lot of good ones for you to choose from, with programs like FonePaw, WinXDVD, and Leawo leading the way. 

Combine Everything Discussed

There are some circumstances where you may even wish to employ a mix of all three options: extract the highlights, convert them to a codec with improved compression, and then lower the bitrate afterwards to achieve the best results. That should allow you to store a large number of clips from journey videos for future reference while keeping the file size to a bare minimum.

Other Things To Keep in Mind

The technicalities of compressing videos are not limited to just software. Anyone can pick up a camera and take a picture. It is only those who know what they are doing that take the time to alter the focal length, shutter speed, and ISO. These technicalities in the compressing arena take the form of codecs and bitrates.

We have briefly discussed the kinds of codecs to make the most out of the compression, but what about bitrates? What are they? What should you be using? We will talk about that in this section so that you know what you have to do once you get your hands on video editing software.

What Is Bitrate?

The bitrate of a video is just a measurement of how much data is transferred each second when watching a video. Megabits per second (Mbps) is the unit of measurement (Mbps). As a general rule of thumb, the greater the bitrate, the more information that is conveyed and, consequently, the higher the quality of the video.

Be that as it may, the effectiveness of the codec being used to compress the video has a significant impact on the bit rates available. When using the same codec, different bitrates will result in varied video quality output; however, newer and more efficient codecs can reduce the bitrate without sacrificing quality.

What Bitrate Should You Use?

Given that bit rates are proportional to the amount of data being communicated, the final bitrate will be determined not only by the codec and encoding parameters but also by the resolution of the video, the frame rate, the high vs standard dynamic range, and other aspects of the video.

Once again, the bitrate should be determined by the manner in which the video is shown. If you're streaming online, you'll want to take into account the internet connection speed of your audience, as well as your upload speed if you're live broadcasting. Generally speaking, for Full HD videos streamed online, you may expect your bitrate to be somewhere in the range of 5-10mbps, according to industry standards. 

The higher the bandwidth available, the higher the bitrate that can be used. Upload speeds of at least 5 megabits per second are ideal. There are a variety of bitrate calculators available on the internet.

Conclusion

While it is easy to disregard compression methods while generating video, it is necessary to at the very least be familiar with the fundamentals in order to select the most appropriate settings when encoding your video.