how to compress a video on mac for email

If you projected a 520p movie onto a cinema screen it would look positively terrible. The funny thing about pixel counts is that it all kind of depends on how big (literally, the physical size) of a screen your movie will be watched on. The important thing is that each pixel is a dot in your movie. So, 540p will have 540 pixels and 720p has … Well, you get the idea. In the screenshot below you can see “540p 60” and “720p 60” while “1080p 60” is grayed out.Īt the risk of completely nerding out, the number before the “p” is the number of pixels in the vertical axis of your movie. Now, the options iMovie gives you are a bunch of numbers. The most reliable way to lower the file size of your final movie is to reduce your movie’s resolution. Unless your life or your career depends on getting your movie exported as fast as possible, I recommend you leave this set to Better Quality. It just gives you an option to export your file faster, at the cost of the picture quality. This is not as interesting or useful as you might think. I have no idea why.)įor completeness’s sake, after Resolution and Quality, the final setting in the Export File window is Compression Setting. (And I do mean range because iMovie is notoriously bad at estimating. When it hits the range you need, you’re good. This is iMovie’s estimate of the size of your exported file (92 megabytes, or around 1/10 th of a gigabyte in the example above).Īs you try different Resolution and Quality options (which will cover in Step 3 below), this number will update automatically. And, yes, the uses for this are extremely rare.īut the Resolution and Quality options are powerful and where you should find the solution to your file size problems.īut before we get into the Resolution and Quality settings, notice the number highlighted by the red arrow in the screenshot above. The fourth option, Format, just gives you the option to export only the audio (no video) of your movie. This will open a new window which looks like the screenshot below.įrom top to bottom, the first three options allow you to 1) set your movie’s title to something more interesting than “Stranger Fictions Are Weird”, 2) provide a Description, and 3) add some Tags. While each of the four options allows some control over the size of your exported file, the Export File (highlighted by the green arrow) options provides the most options and so is where we will focus in this article.

Open the project you want to export from iMovie and click the Share button (highlighted by the red arrow in the screenshot below) or select Share from the File menu.Įither approach provides four options, with the Share button opening a tab with four icons, as can be seen in the screenshot below. In the following five steps, I will take you through the process to export your movie while explaining all the options available to get the smallest file. How to Export a Smaller File from iMovie.

How to compress a video on mac for email