Video is the heaviest thing most people ever email. The good news: most clips can shrink 60–80% with no visible difference — if you compress the right things in the right order.
What actually makes video files big
Three factors multiply together: resolution (pixels per frame), frame rate (frames per second), and bitrate (how much data each second of video is allowed). Bitrate is the big one — it's the quality dial. Codecs (H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1) are the compression engines that decide how much quality survives at a given bitrate.
The order of operations
- Trim first. Deleting the ten dead seconds at the start beats any codec trick — removed footage costs zero bytes. Use Trim Video.
- Downscale resolution to where it's watched. A 4K phone clip watched in a chat window can drop to 1080p or 720p and nobody notices — that alone cuts the file to a quarter or less.
- Lower the bitrate gradually. For 1080p, 4–6 Mbps looks fine for most content; screen recordings tolerate less, fast action needs more.
- Leave frame rate alone unless it's 60fps content viewed casually — halving to 30fps then saves another chunk.
Trim and shrink MP4s locally — the video never leaves your device.
Open Video CompressorQuality checkpoints
- Watch the fast scenes. Compression artefacts (blockiness, smearing) appear first in motion, not in still shots.
- Check text if it's a screen recording. UI text goes fuzzy before anything else — screen content prefers higher resolution and lower frame rate over the reverse.
- Listen to the audio. Audio is small; don't crush it to 64 kbps to save a few MB while the video is the real weight.
When to convert instead
If the destination is a website, a short muted clip is often better as WebM, and a tiny loop may be better as a GIF — but only if it's under ~5 seconds. For everything longer, modern video beats GIF on both size and quality. And if you only need the sound, extract the audio instead of sending the whole video.