Please, help me post a video that's currently too large. I'm a Mac user.

April 26, 2009 9:44 AM

How do I get a too large video on line?

A friend of mine passed away and I created a slide show tribute that I would love to post on-line. I created it with Photo to Movie and have it rendered as an MPEG-4 which is 140 ish Megs. It is also 11:30 Minutes. When I rendered it in Quicktime it was more that 2G.

I have the typical Mac software at my disposal.
I have a place to host it where it needs to be 100 Megs or less.
Is there a way for me to use iMovie or some such to dip the quality a bit? It will only play on people's home computers.

Alternatively, is there a different place to host it? Create a website maybe?
I can put some money into this...

Thanks SO much.

posted by Toto_tot to computers & internet (10 comments total)

You can store it on Amazon and then link to it....downside...you pay for the bandwidth and the storage, but it's pretty cheap.
posted by iamabot at 9:47 AM on April 26

Vimeo Plus?
posted by sharkfu at 9:55 AM on April 26

Do you need to frame the movie in HTML, or is it OK if you just provide a direct link to the file? If the latter works, try a service like Dropbox, which allows you to put large files in your "public" dropbox folder, and create a "public link" to that file (even over 100MB). You can then email/link to that file from other pages, and folks can download/watch it. It's really simple, and has worked for me well to share photos and PDFs (though I haven't tried media). Good luck, it sounds like a really touching project!
posted by rdn at 9:56 AM on April 26

Finding another way to transfer it seems easiest, but on the question of re-sizing it I thought I'd mention that on Windows there are programs like DVD Shrink that let you arbitrarily set the size you want the compressed file to be, so I'd think that there's something of the sort for the Mac if you look in the DVD ripping genre.
posted by XMLicious at 10:09 AM on April 26

Seconding Vimeo, mentioned above, and I don't think you need a plus account.

The free account has a weekly limit of 500 MB so you could just upload the video there and embed it where you need it.
posted by gmm at 10:10 AM on April 26

On Windows I use Avidemux to convert from one format to another. You can even choose the final size of the file. And, there's a Mac OSX X version.
posted by Memo at 10:17 AM on April 26

Eleven and half minutes of slideshow shouldn't need to be that big. Try to export with photo jpg codec instead of a video codec.
posted by mzurer at 10:44 AM on April 26

Uh yeah, there's no reason for 11 minutes of slideshow to be 2G, not even remotely. At extremely high HD quality, maybe a few hundred megs tops. Are you using raw video or something? I'm not really familiar with Quicktime, but something is definitely wrong here..
posted by cj_ at 2:05 PM on April 26

iMovie actually has built-in options to take an existing project and export it to more sane-for-Internet-use sizes. use the Share menu (in iMovie '08 - should be similar for '09, and possibly a lot different for '06). you can either choose "YouTube" or "Export". "Export" will give you some options for quality, and will then save it to your computer for you to put somewhere else. if you choose YouTube, it will upload it straight into YouTube. (you obviously need a YouTube account for this.)

if you have iMovie '06, there's an Export option there as well, but no direct-to-YouTube'ing. and, you can make a YouTube video private if you prefer that the internet-at-large not see your tribute.

if you have .Mac/MobileMe, you can also publish it there. it's another one of the options under Share.
posted by mrg at 2:30 PM on April 26

also, if it's just an MP4 or M4V file you have, you should be able to drag that file straight into iMovie or Import it without issue. and, FWIW, in '08 and '09, the Export option will tell you how big the resulting file will possibly be - just hover over the little "i" icons for each quality setting.

(also, saying "QuickTime" is vague - kinda like saying you have an AVI file. it could very well have ended up being some raw MPEG-1 video or with resolution approaching that of the original images. there's a number of codecs you can use with QuickTime, and some of them result in really large file sizes.)
posted by mrg at 2:39 PM on April 26