Expert: R. Ferguson - 11/30/2005

Question
Hi Jeff,

I'm going to be traveling and will be bringing along a Sony digital video camera.  I am going to want to send videos to relatives while I am gone and was wondering what the best method to do that is.  Is there a way to compress a 5 or 10 megabyte video so it can be sent via email or is there another way to do it?  Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Chris

Answer
You don't say how you're getting the video into the 'puter or how you're getting it to 5-10mb, so I'll just tell you what we do here.

We load our video in (and edit it).  It comes in at 720x486 (pixels) at 30 frames per sec (fps).  Once we have a complete program (in my case a :30 commercial), we export it from our editing program as an mpeg-1 file at 320x240 and 30fps..  Typically a :30 piece of video using this method is 5.2 megs.  This will email easily over high speed connection and so far we have had no compatibility issues.

You can decrease this file size by doing a number of things:
* Drop the frame rate from 30 fps to 20 or 15 or 12.  I wouldn't go much lower than that, it gets jumpy.
* Use a diferent codec (Sorenson makes pretty small files.  mpeg-4 is another one to try). You'll have to experiment with this to find the one that makes the smallest file AND is compaitble with you intended viewers' players (they can d'load most codecs for free).
* Make the video smaller than 320x240 (I don't really recommend this...picture gets too small to enjoy).

Try my first 2 recommendations and see how small you can get your videos without compromising alot of quality.  There will be some quality loss regardless.

Most servers will only allow about a 10mb file to pass thru so you may have to break up the video into chunks.  Mailboxes also have quantity limits so don't expect a standard email address to accept lots of video without being cleared out.

You may want to try setting up an ftp site or a web site that you can post the video to.  That way people can go and get as much as they want when they want it.

Good luck and travel safely!