Poderosa Ranch

How do you get small video files? Well that is a hard question to answer. There are many things that make a video file large. Multiple transitions, callouts, zoom and pans, and as well as audio will increase the size of the video. The size in which you produce the video will also increase it. A 340×280 video is going to be much smaller than a 800×600 video. Then selection is based on the need for the video. Will this be shown on a website, disk, or something else? For me I typically produce my videos in mp4 or flv formats, but that is because I create videos for web sites mostly. To make my videos smaller in Camtasia Studio I will lower the Frame rate to below 10 and the key frame every 5 seconds. By doing this you are capturing less keyframes so, less toward the end size. There is a trade off here though and that can be quality. Lowering the frame rate only works well with videos that do not have many animations like fade-in and out of callouts and zooms.

Another area to cut back on is the audio settings. You don’t need to have it set for more than 64 kbps. 128 is CD quality, but does your presentation really need that? You have to decide.

You have to find a balance. The more you pack in the bigger and there is not much you can do about that. To speed up download times split the videos into multiple video, but have the player play them in sequence. The viewer won’t realize it most of the time.

I hope that gave you some insight.

Tags: Camtasia Studio, Video

This entry was posted by Jason Clemens on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Camtasia Studio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.