Video straight from a phone or a screen recorder is far bigger than it needs to be for sharing. A one minute clip can be 150 MB, when 15 MB would look the same on a phone screen. Large files are slow to upload, fail on weak connections and hit the size limits of email, chat apps and listing pages.
This compressor re-encodes your video as an H.264 MP4 at a lower bitrate, inside your browser. Choose a quality and let it pick the size, or type the size you need and let it work out the quality. You can also lower the resolution and the frame rate, and keep, shrink or remove the sound. The file is never uploaded, there is no watermark and no account.
Quality or target size: which to use
Use Quality when you only want a smaller file and have no exact limit. Medium suits social posts, pins and web pages. High is for footage you will edit again or show on a large screen. Low is for previews and for sending a rough cut.
Use File size when something has a limit: an email attachment, a chat app, a form that rejects large uploads. Type the limit and the tool spreads the available bits over the length of the video. A long video squeezed into a small size will look soft, so lower the resolution to 720p or 480p in that case. Fewer pixels at the same size look cleaner than many starved ones.
What makes a video file small
File size is bitrate times length. Resolution and frame rate do not set the size directly, but they decide how far a given bitrate has to stretch. Halving the resolution leaves four times as many bits for each pixel, which is why a 720p file at a low bitrate often looks better than a 1080p one at the same size.
Footage with little movement, such as a talking head, a slideshow or a screen recording, compresses much further than sport or handheld footage. Sound is usually a small part of the file, so removing it saves little unless the video is very long or the picture is already tiny.
Compressing video for Pinterest and other sites
Pinterest takes MP4 and M4V files on the web, encoded with H.264 or H.265, from 4 seconds to 5 minutes long. The file this tool makes is an H.264 MP4, so it fits. A smaller file uploads faster and is less likely to fail part way.
If the clip is the wrong shape for a pin, reshape it first with the Pinterest video resizer. To add a title, use add text to video, and for a short silent loop, the video to GIF converter.
