How To Compress Videos For Vimeo
Up until today, I had been uploading the AVI files straight from my Canon Powershot G9. The problem is those files can get huge (about 112MB per minute), since I use the 1024x768 setting. Vimeo only gives you 500MB per week (unless you pay them $60 a year), so I haven’t been posting videos very frequently. I figured I could wait to post more rather than spending the time compressing the videos. But now I have a bunch I want to share with you. Then I remembered Handbrake, an excellent and free video compression app.
Here are the settings I used on my Mac:
- Launch Handbrake.
- Click on “Toggle Presets” on the top right.
- Expand the “Apple” category and select “Universal” (this preset already follows most of Vimeo’s compression guidelines). You can also try the “Normal” and “High Profile” settings under “Regular” and see which one you prefer.
- In the main window, click on the “Audio” tab.
- If the audio doesn’t sound as clear as you’d like, try setting a higher AAC Bitrate in the Audio tab (in the middle of the main window).
- You can create a custom preset with these settings: click on the “+” button at the bottom of the Presets drawer and name it “vimeo” for example.
- Click on “Start” at the top left, and a few minutes later you should end up with a .m4v file that looks and sounds great, but is only about 12% of the size of the original AVI.
