Video for Email

dfred wrote on 3/12/2008, 7:31 PM
I have a clip that is 70MB. It's both video and audio and I would like to be able to email this clip. Thus far, the only way I can figure out is to render this as a .avi file then load it into Windows Movie Maker, drag onto the timeline, save, then "send as email." This works and does send the entire clip. However, when the recipient opens the attachment, the sound is great but the video itself is very small.

After playing around with the same clip, I found that if I make it very small (by editing/splitting) and render as MPEG2, the file is around 5MB. When the recipient opens the attachment it does fill more of the screen. I sent a copy to myself to test this.

I tried compressing it but it doesn't compress that much, certainly not enough to attach the entire 70MB clip to email.

Thanks for the help.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/12/2008, 7:43 PM
It's entirely about the bitrate and length of the video. Nothing else figures into the equation at all. If you have a 1 minute video that's 80MB at 1mbps (including both audio and video) and you want to get it down to 10MB then you have to render it at 128mbps (including both audio and video). That's all there is to it. Nothing else matters.*

Unfortunately Vegas Studio doesn't give you much control over bitrates when rendering to MPEG. It's not an issue in your case though. If you want small files then WMV or DivX or Mov are much better choices. MPEG gets really nasty at lower bitrates. The other formats are designed to look better at the lower bitrates. Depending on your tolerance levels, you can get useful video as low as 100mbps from DivX. It may look ugly, but it's probably viewable. MPEG craps out badly at 6 times that rate.

Possibly a better idea yet is not to email the video at all. Host the video on a website somewhere and then email the URL to the video instead. That way it doesn't take more than a fraction of a second to send or receive the email, the recipient's inbox doesn't get flooded, and they can go fetch/download the video whenever they wish instead of having it forced on them when they retrieve the email.

*True, using smaller frame sizes and/or lower frame rates can help lower bitrate video look better. 640x480 may be fine at 1.5Mbps but it will look terrible at 256Kbps. You may get away with 320x240 at that bitrate. For lower bitrates you might want to consider 160x120 and 10 or 15fps. However, changing the frame size and rate do NOT change the file size. That is dependant only on the bitrate. Using smaller frames merely helps lower bitrates to look better.
dfred wrote on 3/13/2008, 1:48 PM
Although I did not know about the technical aspects, such as bitrate and rendering down to, say, 128mbps, your response was clear and informative.

I actually did save it as WMV and the person I emailed it to could see and hear it, although it was a very small view of the video itself.

Last night after I read your post, I went to my Verizon account and into the web page section to try to add the video clip to my web page. Unfortunately, even though I had gotten the file down to about 70MB, it was still too large to upload to the Verizon web site I created.

That brings me to my next question - do you know of any sites that offer free hosting for files maybe up to 100MB? I could look myself but you and others seem to be the real experts when it comes to this stuff.

Thanks again for the help.
Terry Esslinger wrote on 3/13/2008, 3:46 PM
Take a look at Vimeo
http://www.vimeo.com/
Eugenia wrote on 3/13/2008, 5:25 PM
Well said Terry. Vimeo allows you to password-protect videos and pages. So it's easy to just upload it there, and then just email the URL and password to the viewer.
dfred wrote on 3/13/2008, 7:34 PM
Thank you both for the info about Vimeo. I bookmarked the site and will check it out further tomorrow. This may be just the solution; however, is there a file size limit for uploading? My current project is about 70MB in MPEG2 format.

Thanks again.
Eugenia wrote on 3/13/2008, 8:04 PM
Vimeo has a 500 MB limit per week.