If you are finding that your files are too large and taking too long to upload and taking up to much space, the following tips may help to create smaller files, but still, keep the end viewing quality high for your students.
Basic Camera Settings:
On the camera keep the movie format as MP4
Do not film in HD
Change the video quality to 4MB/second.
Compress Your Files:
We recommend compressing your video files using a free software tool like VLC or Handbrake. Here's a brief tutorial that we put together for a Marvelous customer on how to do this using the tool. We've found that a good rule of thumb is to compress to about ~ 500-700 MB per hour of video, so a 30-minute video would be about 275 MB.
Watch the video inside the Marvelous Film School (accessible inside Soulful MBA or with Marvelous purchase) called "Video File Conversion to MP4" to see Handbrake in action. In the video, our videographer suggests setting the bitrate in Handbrake at 5000 but we have found that it doesn't significantly compress the files enough. We suggest changing the bitrate to 2500.
Internet Connection
Your ability to upload files larger than about 800 MB may be limited by your Internet connection speed and/or the number of other files being simultaneously uploaded to our server, but we strongly advise compression since it will save you on upload time, storage space, and the hassle of having to deal with unnecessarily large video files.
Student Experience
Since your students will not be viewing these videos on anything larger than a TV (and usually on something much, much smaller like a laptop, tablet, or smartphone), the compression should not make a noticeable difference in video quality.
Contact Us 🧡
For any questions reach out to us in our live chat or send us an email at team@heymarvelous.com 🙂