How to Reduce Video File Size with Without Compromising Video Quality: Handbrake Tutorial

hi welcome to Teachers Tech my name is Jamie  and it's great to have you here today I want   to show you how you can reduce video file size  with handbrake without compromising any video   quality so this is a free method you are  going to need to download a handbrake on   your computer and this is available  whether you're on your Windows   or Mac or Linux there's lots of operating  systems you can choose from so today let me   show you how you can compress your video  without losing any video quality foreign

so step one is to install handbrake and like I  said handbrake is free and it's cross-platform so   just go ahead and click on the red button here and  follow the instructions to install it onto your   computer so if you left the check mark checked  to have the desktop shortcut you should have this   right here now I want to point out I have a video  underneath it that I'm going to compress today   and this one you can see it runs about 400 Megs a  little less than that I'm going to compress this   to a different size where also I don't lose any  of the quality I actually used handbrake the other   day I compressed an 18 gig video and I didn't even  go through a lot of the settings but I was able to   bring it down to three gigs very quickly so let's  go ahead and open up handbrake now so now that I

have handbrake opened you can see you have a  few different options I could go to a folder   for a batch scan so I would go and just select  any of these and go pick the folder I could   go to a file and upload it or I can just simply  drag or drop things over so in this case the one   I showed you I'm just going to drag and drop it in  here and now I'm going to just get ready to show   you how we can pick some quick settings and how we  even can modify them so now that I got this open   you can quickly go and add a source to handbrake  now I can do this in a few different ways I could   put an entire folder connected with this so if you  have a bunch of videos in the folder so you could   open it this way and just click on it and then go  get that folder select the one or I could open a   individual file just like that so that's one way  you can do it but you can just drag things over   too so I if I had an entire folder I can just  drag it into here so I'm going to be using this   video and I can just drag it in so right away  when I drag it in it gives me a source preview   here and if I look up at the top right here we  have source so this is what it was called here   but if I ever want to change the source maybe I  put the wrong one in the wrong video and I wanted   a different one just go back to open source here  and then you could go ahead and drag a different   one or go find it but if you don't want to change  it you can just go ahead and hit cancel and notice   this time if I go back I can if I wanted to change  any of these titles the titles here of choose to   it I could but I only have the one video so I  don't have a bunch of different ones to go from   from a batch so it's just going to be that one  now again I don't have any chapters in this as   well so the next thing that I want to point out  that we're going to move on to is we're going to   take a look at the preset how we can quickly  choose uh settings but then we have all these   settings down here that we can make adjustments to  modify even the preset that we chose so if we take   a quick look at my source again you can see at 38  40 times 2160 this is in 4k we have 30 frames per   second so I want to be able to compress this now  a quick way to do this is just to use the preset

and by default you can see that this is set right  here to 1080p 30 frames so this is fast but if we   drop down I want to show you can choose a lot  of different ones so if you kind of just scroll   down through here you can see kind of the general  lens you can see ones for the web if I hover over   any of these you gives you a description of why  you would choose any of these here so you could   get this long list maybe you want to watch it on  a different device where you can make it smaller   the file but not lose the quality for that device  so you have lots of options now let's say this is   just you're good with this and you just want  to start compressing before getting into any   of these settings to modify you just are in a  hurry what you can do is go ahead and just click   Start encode and it's going to start making it  smaller so it's going to take it from the source   and go to preset what this set is here I want  to point out at the bottom here this is where   it's going to get saved as so it gives the path  if I go over to browse I can open up and choose   the location that I would like and then you can  see there's also when done we have some options   here uh what you want to do as well but we're not  going to process this yet I just wanted to show if   you're in a hurry you can go ahead and do that and  just leave it at that first preset now let's say   you weren't sure maybe what the quality would be  like for this what you can do is you can create a   quick preview because sometimes when you start  your compressing when it goes through this it   can take a while to definitely also based on your  settings so you can actually do a quick preview   of what the compression will look like so if I  go to preview what happens is I can generate a   live preview so this is just the preview rate now  but what I can do is go to here well maybe I just   want a quick 10 seconds here but I can choose more  if I want to drop down but I all I have to do is   choose 10 let's say where I can make some show  crop adjustment controls I don't need that I'm

just going to go live preview and what it takes  since this is only 10 seconds it's going to run   through this quite quickly and then a different  window on my computer is going to open up with   that 10 seconds and I'll show you here you shared  with others because so now this is opened up and   I have this 10 second clip in my Windows Media  Player because it opened by default and I can   take a quick look at the Quality to see if that  was good without having to process the whole   thing okay so let's go now into the individual  settings how we can make some modifications to

this so that you can get your compression and  quality just the way you want so maybe you have   a little more time to play around with your  settings just to see what the difference is you   can make yourself now on this first tab right here  we get a summary of the settings and we can kind   of just take that quick look so we can see the  format MP4 we could drop down make the changes   there if we would like we're going to start  from there and we have these different checks   and we can see the tracks that are connected to  the different settings in the other tabs notice   how this is format MP4 you can change the default  on this as well if you ever want to look for any   of your defaults just go up to your preferences  under Tools and take a look at all the different   preferences that you can go through so for example  if I take a look at the output file uh here's that   one right here MP4 extension always use MP4 but  I could make an adjustment right here so I just   want to point out there are preferences that  you can go through and set as long as well as   your default location so I'm going to go back and  just to kind of go through these different tabs in   these settings so if I go over to Dimensions you  can see right away we have a few more options we   can do some cropping and orientation so if you  filmed it maybe in the wrong way and then you   can just make that change here so this can do a  lot more than just compression you can do those   cropping maybe you have those black lines on the  side that you'd like to remove so this is where   you can do that we have resolution and scaling so  notice we have 1080p I did start this is a   4K one so it's going to be turned into 1080p but  this is where I can make some changes as well as   well as in take a look at the different options  and I can even Place borders on if I go over to   the next tab we have filters and I'm not going to  make any changes I actually haven't played with a   lot of these changes besides the grayscale which  turns it simply into black and white but I'm not   going to make any adjustment to these filters if  we go over to video here I want to point out with   any of these things if we hover over if you're not  sure what anything is so take a look where it says   quality if I hover over you can see it gives a  description so with this in this case uh if I   change this all the way to zero the size is going  to be actually larger than what I started with so   you can see that it gives the kind of description  tells you which way you can drag things on the   quality so if you look through it a value of zero  means lossless and then you'd have a bigger file   so you wouldn't want to be dragging this all the  way up now over here I take a look at video so   right now we have our h. 264 and this is common for  YouTube videos and everything we do have different   formats we could go to we have our h. 265 which  is newer but I'm not sure if all formats all uh   all different services will accept the 265 but  you can go ahead and try that out as well   so if we go through we have some encoder options  and notice that we can go faster or slower again   hover over this so adjust the encoder settings  to trade off compression efficient efficiency   against in coding speed so making sure you know  how fast you want this to go are you ready to lose   some quality or some compression in it so just go  through and make those adjustments depending what   you want if I go over to audio I can select the  different codecs for audio usually doesn't make   a big difference in the uh the overall size of the  file so I'm not going to make any changes in this   you can see where I can make bitrate changes in  this and the different mix down as well I don't   have any subtitles or anything in this video  here that I would be choosing any of these   but you can see the different settings if you do  have these in your videos and also with chapters   um as well so now if everything is set the way  you'd want all you need to do now I would suggest   do your preview first to check make sure that  the quality is as good as you want it to be but

you can go ahead and you just hit start encoding  so this is where the process is going to start so   if you look at the bottom it's going to start  going through and it gives me the time elapse   here and remember depending on your settings this  can take a bit of time here but if we look we have   some options here where we can stop it or pause  it so I'm just going to let this run through and   then we'll compare our size of the files at the  end so that took about 10 minutes to go through   that processing on handbrake 400 megabyte file  let's see what we got now if I go over it   you can see the original one right here but if  I just go and check out the properties here we   can now see that it's 88. 3 megabytes it went  from 400 to 8 88 on it again I could make some   changes to the different settings if I wanted  to try to get that smaller but remember you   might lose quality if you do find the settings  uh you kind of get everything the way you would

like here you can save that as a preset so you  don't have to go back each time and save them so   if I had this all set up the way I want I could  go up to presets here and we could go ahead and   add a preset see the ones that we already have  but I could go ahead and add one and give it   a name and go through there so if you do get  it just the way you want save your time with   making a preset so I hope you like this how to  use handbrake to compress your videos without   losing quality I find this is very helpful I use  this quite a bit and it doesn't cost anything let   me know what's working and what's not working  for you down below in the description thanks   for watching this time on teachers Tech I'll see  you next time with more Tech tips and tutorials