I have a Xiaomi phone with 13MP camera, and I'd like to record static videos, however when I tried to record anything, a minute is 105MB!

This is insane, is it really normal for 58 seconds of full HD video to be 105MB big? Is there any way to reduce the size, should I perhaps use another application?

I can reduce the quality to HD or SD, but I'd like it to be of good quality so it'll be usable for Youtube video.

What would you recommend? Do you usually somehow trim the size after recording or...?

There should be both a resolution and quality setting under your camera options (at least there is on my phone), but they will both reduce the quality so depending on just how good you need the video to be that might not be appropriate...

Unfortunately video does tend to take a lot of space, particularly HD...

But perhaps someone who does more videoing and video editing might have some tips.

How much would a minute of HD (vs full HD) video take using your phone? Just to compare. Mine doesn't have resolution reduction, only quality...

Well, 34 seconds at full quality and resolution (1920 * 1080) is 71.2MB.

So I'd imagine a full minute to be about 150MB...

Edit: Found a longer clip, 1:04 is 132MB

To me that doesn't sound too much for (raw?) HD video taken on the fly.

However, I wonder what video format it is? I presume video is quite often post-processed where the size might go down a lot. Like turning a raw video to a MPEG-2 video where only the changes to frames are kept, not the full data for each frame? Or even more advanced methods like divx or whatever are the relevant ones nowadays...

I presume that is not possible to process video like that on the fly, is it? So when you shoot a video with a camera, you get a raw video, or maybe slightly compressed in some method that can be applied while shooting the video. Then, afterwards, you run more advanced compression methods which take away data from the frames which is not necessarily needed, analyze the frames to each other (to keep only data that changes between frames) etc.

It might be I'm way off with this, but that's how I've thought it to be...

Actually, they are saved in MP4 and not raw. But yeah, I also thought that if you've got raw files and then you convert them, you save space. Given the fact that full HD movies which last over two hours can be as small as two or three GB, there should definitely be a way to convert it and make the MP4 size smaller! Otherwise a 60 minute video would be 6GB!

How would you recommend making the recorded size smaller, whether during the recording or afterwards?

Thanks!

I was wondering, do you lose any quality by doing that?

Real men record with betamax camcorders.

An old Necro'd thread. (is 8 months necro'd?)

But to be serious. MP4 file IS just a container, the Mpeg4 standard has dozens of options and settings you can adjust it for optimizing. However for phones, android devices, camcorders and others will be encoding with minimal settings in order to do it QUICKLY. Re-encoding at a slower rate with more settings turned on will result in much smaller files, especially if it's set as VBR (Variable Bitrate), although likely VBR won't make a huge difference with a moving camera. You also want to do a 2 pass encoding if your program supports it.

Although re-encoding at a slower more in depth rate may take a long while; Like, a week for a 1 hour section. Safe to say a lot of people don't like waiting and won't do it.

It's my own thread though. And since I was curious about it, it's better to ask here than to open another thread about it, right? :D

Thanks! Which software would you recommend?

Seems logical, yeah I'd avoid opening new threads if I can.

I personally use VirtualDub for most of my needs. There's a 2-pass encoding option build into x264vfw. This simply encodes a dummy stream that's empty but the audio is still encoded normally so you're better off disabling audio during the first pass, then enabling things for the second pass.

My first encounter with a 2-pass encoding was with NeroBurner, which did 2 passes on Mpeg2 video before making a master file for burning to DVD. Experimenting I could put something like 8-10 episodes of an anime looking really decent using that technique. Can't remember what I was doing. But it was certainly effective.