Videos recorded with digital cameras, camcorders, smart phones are usually very big. Most of these devices can shoot SD videos, HD videos and even UHD videos. For example, you can refer to this guide to use Samsung phone to record 4K videos. These heavy videos are excellent to be played on HD TV. However they are not idea if you want to transfer or share them with others through email, web or a file transfer tool. For instance, if you have a video want to upload to YouTube or other website, you may be warned the video is too large to upload. If you want to attach a video to email and sent the video by email, you may have noticed that the file is too large. In an earlier guide, we have showed you how to compress 4K UHD videos. Today, we will share with you easy ways to compress videos on computer without sacrificing the quality or the quality downgrade will be so slight as to be unnoticeable. After the video compression or resize, you will be able to send videos by email or publish videos to website easily.
Compress videos on computer with Video Compressor
You need to use a video converter or video compressor in order to compress large videos or resize big videos to smaller size. We recommend Video Converter Ultimate for both Windows and Mac OS X users. You can download it now before we proceed.
Launch the media program on your computer, its Convert tab opens automatically. Switch to the Toolbox from the top section, you will find various useful video tools, like Media Metadata Fix, VR Converter, Screen Recorder, GIF Maker, Video Compress, CD Burner and so on. See below screenshot.
Choose Video Compress from the Toolbox, click the + button to find the big video file that you want to reduce its file size. You will then have the options to set a smaller file size, choose a different video format, change video resolution, etc. You can simply drag the File Size bar to a smaller value and leave other parameters unchanged. Then click the Preview button to play a small portion of the compressed video. Change the Save File path at the bottom if need. Finally hit the Compress button to reduce down the file size of the video and save it to the save path on your computer hard drive.
Other ways to reduce video file size
The Video Converter does not only convert video files from one format to another. It also allows users to edit many aspects of their videos. For example, you can also shrink video size by adjusting its video encoder, video quality, frame rate, resolution, bitrate, etc.
Under the Convert mode, go to add a video to the converter, and choose a output video format, you will then see the video size change instantly before video compressor. That’s to say, you can know the target video file size before the conversion.
Other than manually editing the video parameters to reduce down its file size, you can also choose your target device which you want to play the video on, like your smartphone or tablet, then the optimized video profile will be applied. These profiles will adjust the video bitrate, codec, resolution, quality accordingly and thus you can shrink video size automatically. For example, you can refer to this guide to convert videos to iPhone format, and these steps to convert videos to Facebook.
Now you know how to compress your home made videos, compress videos to send by email, compress videos for web or other file transfer tools. You can now transfer and share big videos more quickly and easily.
Update Apr 2019: this article was originally published in Jan 2016 and has since been updated. the new Video Compressor that was added to the Toolbox of the above Video Converter and we have edited this guide to reflect the change accordingly.