Video compression software/website e.g. for performing arts performances

[Starbug1]

Our Performing Arts department has a requirement to compress videos, as the exam board has a limit of 600MB (I assume this is per video, and that some videos are larger than this).

 

We have VLC installed on all PCs, so that may be the best way forward; does anyone use this? I found a guide at https://www.capcut.com/resource/vlc-compress-video#3 ways to compress video with VLC Media Player however if anyone has a guide for teachers, or any suggested settings, or any experience of doing this, that would be great.

 

Ideally I want the process to be carried out by the Performing Arts subject leader, who will be submitting the video, so the process can't be too complicated, otherwise they may ask us to do it, which adds a layer of complexity  (and, potentially, responsibility!)

 

Alternatively, I see there are free sites online that offer to resize videos; can anyone confirm if any of these suits are suitable and offer good enough quality?

 

This could be for all sorts of uses; performing arts performances to exam boards is just one example that has cropped up for us.

 

I did try searching for an existing thread but didn't see one.

 

Many thanks in advance!

[DalekSec]

1 word, Handbrake

 

https://handbrake.fr/ 

[robslack]

Use Handbrake - I do this for my Wife who is a drama teacher all the time

[3s-gtech]

I'm doing it today, for a department, with Handbrake. It's one of those things that I could put on staff laptops and let them get on, but I will more reliably do it, on a powerful PC, and Handbrake makes it easy.

[jthompson]

Yep. Handbrake. You can add jobs to a queue with a view to batch processing.

 

Most dedicated video cameras will produce very heavy filesizes on default settings (mostly down to using high bitrates?) so you can slash the filesizes massively without any noticaeble drop in picture quality.

 

Previously I would have suggested FormatFactory, but that's regarded as a "PUP" vehicle these days, so avoid that.

[dhicks]

36 minutes ago, Starbug1 said:

Ideally I want the process to be carried out by the Performing Arts subject leader, who will be submitting the video, so the process can't be too complicated, otherwise they may ask us to do it, which adds a layer of complexity  (and, potentially, responsibility!)

 

If your staff are putting videos in specific folders (either on a local file server or on CloudStorage), you could have a script look at those folders and produce compressed versions of the video files, probably using ffmpeg (a very widely-used tool for video manipulation). It should be quite a simple script, the sort of thing you could have Gemini / Copilot / etc write for you.

[machy]

1 minute ago, dhicks said:

 

If your staff are putting videos in specific folders (either on a local file server or on CloudStorage), you could have a script look at those folders and produce compressed versions of the video files, probably using ffmpeg (a very widely-used tool for video manipulation). It should be quite a simple script, the sort of thing you could have Gemini / Copilot / etc write for you.

Bleep Bloop

or your friendly neighbourhood Machy 🤣

 

Change CRF to adjust quality and adjust paths as needed 

 

 

$Videos = gci "C:\Scripts\PE" -filter "*.mp4" 

Foreach ($Vid in $Videos) { 
    $NameNoExt = [io.path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension("$Vid")
    Write-Host $NameNoExt
    Write-Host "Attempting to C:\Scripts\PE\$Vid to C:\Scripts\PE\$NameNoExt`_Converted.$EXT at $Quailty" -foregroundcolor blue
    C:\Scripts\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -v verbose -i "C:\Scripts\PE\$Vid" -codec copy -preset "fast" -crf 20 -vcodec libx264 "C:\Scripts\PE\$NameNoExt`_Converted.MP4" 

}

 

[Starbug1]

Thanks all. I suggested this software, and have not heard anything back, so I assume they are getting on with it!

[thebyronic]

The WJEC here in Wales provide a guide and a Handbrake preset for this.

It nukes the quality but they're fine with that. 

https://www.wjec.co.uk/media/ovwgxias/video-batch-process-v1.pdf 

[Davit2005]

Whilst playing with Linux and using it to create videos with Davinci Resolve I had a script that detected new files in a specific folder then convert them and dumped in a new folder with ffmpeg.

 

Worked really well, why Linux version of Davinci needed the files converted and Windows version did not I don't know, lol. But it was an ex server with a Xeon 16 core, 24GB and a decent'ish GPU that converted files very rapidly.