I like wetransfer. Its a great tool for sending large files but I hate it when I get a file via wetransfer related to my work because its usually a 500mb 1920x1080 file for a 5 minute video. That too animatics that would do just as well at 360p which would be around 10mb. This is the local animation industry. We deal with video files day in day out but few give a second thought to the size issue.
So how to reduce your video file to mail-able or whatsapp-able size?
There is such a thing called encoding! Notice how you can rar or zip a video but it wouldn't get meaningfully smaller? So how do you get a 20mb file from a 500mb file? Encoding is the winzip of video files. Well not exactly. Zipping is lossless while encoding is lossy. Meaning, it causes a drop in video quality. But with an encoder, you can control how much quality will be lost.
Enter handbrake, the free and easy to use video encoder.
Select the source files and enter a destination path (like D:\myfiles\video.mp4) and you are now ready to shrink it.
For the really big reductions, you need to reduce the picture resolution in the "Picture" tab. Check if you really need a 1920x1080 file. If not maybe you could settle for a 960x540 file. Its still quite a good resolution but its only a fourth the size of 1920x1080. If you are making a whatsapp video, go even smaller to 640x360 or lower.
Now in the "Video" tab use these settings and tweak the quality slider if you need to. Lower quality means more data loss means smaller file.
In the "Audio" tab, set codec "aac" and drop to 96kbps bitrate and drop mixdown to stereo or mono as you see fit. Mono will give the best size reduction.
Now click "Start" and you should have your 10min video file shrunk to within the gmail attachment limit of 25mb. Also as long as your file's container is ".mp4" and was encoded with "h.264" for video and "aac" for audio, it should play on pretty much every device. Also, such a file will upload and process faster when uploaded to youtube.
So use handbrake!
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