Creating Media

One of the most important factors to keep in mind while creating a webpage is 0:00 file sizes. 0:04 The more data you have to load, 0:06 the more your site visitors ill have to wait around. 0:07 This is always important but 0:11 it's especially important with media, like audio and video, 0:12 because they typically have much larger file sizes than text and images. 0:17 It's not enough to just take a video clip from your camera or your smartphone and 0:22 just toss it onto a webpage. 0:27 Rather, you need to make sure that you compress the video and audio properly so 0:29 that it has a small file size, but still looks and sounds good. 0:35 So, there's a couple of different programs that you could use to do this. 0:40 One is VLC or VideoLan, and this is a media player, 0:45 but it does a whole bunch of stuff, and one of them is convert video. 0:50 You could also use another program like Adobe Media Encoder or 0:54 maybe a nonlinear video editor of your choice. 1:00 Just about anything will be able to convert the video into at least H.264, 1:04 which is a format supported by Internet Explorer and Safari. 1:09 However, to get the files into Ogg Theora, VLC should work just fine. 1:14 So let's switch over to VLC. 1:19 You can download it, 1:22 and when you install it on a Mac, it will look something like this. 1:24 And I'll go up to File here. 1:28 And I'll say convert slash stream. 1:31 It will give me a window here where I can open media. 1:35 Then, I have the file here that I want to convert. 1:39 I already have this video. 1:43 This was shot on a pretty nice camera but, you can get this same kind of file format 1:46 from an iPhone or maybe an Android phone and convert it. 1:51 Pretty much any incoming video you can convert into the format that you need. 1:57 Next, you'll need to choose a profile and there's two things going on here. 2:02 There is the encapsulation and there's also the video Kodak. 2:06 So before we get into that, let's go back and take a look. 2:12 The encapsulation is basically the file format. 2:15 So in this case we're gonna have an MP4 but could have something like 2:18 web M which is another web based video format. 2:23 And there is also Theora Vorbis or 2:27 OGG Theora as it's sometimes called and this is going to be an OGG file format. 2:30 So that's the encapsulation. 2:36 Then the CODEC is how the video and the audio is compressed. 2:38 That's why there's two things listed on each one of these with a plus. 2:42 So H.264 in this case, is the video compression. 2:47 And then, MP3 is the audio compression. 2:52 There's also Theora Vorbis, which is a video, and audio combination. 2:56 So again, for Internet Explorer and Safari, this first one will work. 3:03 And then you can click Save as file, and then you can choose an output location. 3:08 So maybe you can save it in the same spot and just call it myvideo or 3:15 whatever you want to call it. 3:19 In this case we called it Bridge.mp4, and 3:21 you would click Save, and it would start to convert for you. 3:24 And then you would want to do the same thing for [UNKNOWN, and 3:30 if you click Browse, you could save it to a location and it will save out. 3:36 Now the thing to remember here is you want to keep this file size low. 3:42 So if you click that customize button you can go to the video codec, 3:46 and let's actually go back to H.264 plus mp3, 3:52 and under video codec here you can adjust the bit rate. 3:57 So you might want to put something on the order of 5,000 or 4:01 maybe 10,000 and slowly work your way down. 4:04 And the frame rate for this particular video is 24 frames per second but 4:09 you can adjust that if you like and then you want an output resolution. 4:14 This is another place that you can play with the file size. 4:18 So you might say 1280 by 720 and the source for this particular video 4:22 is 1920 1080 so we'd actually be scaling this down in resolution a little bit. 4:28 But that will produce a smaller file size. 4:32 So the bit rates and the resolution under video are two things to pay attention to. 4:36 So when you output video and audio, make sure to adjust your settings 4:42 appropriately so that you get the optimal balance between file size and quality. 4:47