Do you hate it when you see the spinning wheel of a loading video animation? It’s spinning and spinning, what could one do?
YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Facebook) they’re all going to transcode and compress your uploaded video for their respective platforms. Online learning communities, not so much. Today, you will learn how to optimize your videos to be smaller but keep the quality intact for many devices.
In the past few weeks, I have been teaching online using Zoom and recording my sessions with my students. I edit the Zoom videos, and remove any dead air, the ahhhss, ok’s, ummms, and adding relevant notes to the video. When it’s time to export the videos to a video format, they are huge.
Video Platforms
Regardless of which video platform you upload to (YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Facebook) they’re all going to transcode and compress your uploaded video. This is unavoidable, but it’s also necessary to ensure your video plays back smoothly online. So, I don’t compress my videos for those platforms.
Online eLearning Platforms
With online course platforms, such as Thinkific, Udemy, and Skillshare they don’t compress your videos for their platforms. It’s strongly recommended you compress your videos, as larger video files can load slowly for any students who are over a slower internet connection.
HandBrake!
I use an application called HandBrake, a free tool that you can use to compress your video without reducing the quality of the video. This application is available for free and open-source for either Windows, Macs and Linux. Convert video from nearly any format. Go to their website, and download from HandBrake themselves https://handbrake.fr
When you open HandBrake, you have the choice to search and select the video to get started in compressing your video. Or you can click on cancel, and you will see colour bars in the software. What I normally do, I drag and drop my video inside here. In my example, my file for ‘Final-Project-Walk-Through’ is 736mb! You could see many different file formats for the web, video, phones to tv and production.
I use Handbrake as a compression tool, but, you can go in-depth with chapters, filters, to changing the final size and adding subtitles. I typically leave the default settings to my videos and only change it to be Very Fast 1080p30. It’s fast and compatible across a wide range of software and devices. After I choose the file format that I need to upload and share with my students, Handbrake starts to encode the video at the bottom of the application with an ETA when it will finish. After our file is optimized, the file size is reduced by 83% and is now 123mb.
Having video optimized for online courses such as Thinkific will download quickly on a mobile, tablet or desktop. But probably the most important value here is your students will appreciate the smaller videos too!