Why you should optimize your videos

Video files are often unnecessarily large. When you have e.g. 50 videos in your Showell account, and each are 500MB in size. That’s 25GB in total. That is also how much data is transferred when new users  install and open their Showell App for the first time. Every user also needs to have enough space on their device to store those 25GB. Even if they have the required space, downloading the files is going to take long time. 

By optimizing your videos you can bring down the file size of each video significantly and therefore decrease the size of your Showell account dramatically. Launching Showell for your users is a lot easier and faster and a lot of space is saved from their devices. By optimizing your content you're improving the user experience of your team significantly. 

How to optimize your videos

Things that you should consider when optimizing is:

• File size
• File format
• Resolution & aspect ratio
• Frame rate

By reducing the file size you can save a lot of time (and nerves!) from the initial set up process. By choosing a common video file format (.mov, .wmv, .mp4, .m4v, .3gp, .mpg, .mpeg, .avi, .asf, .flv) you can be sure that the video will play on all different devices.

If your company has a primary device that is used by the entire organization, it is easy to optimize your videos to match the aspect ratio of that device. For example if you're using an iPad, you would use 4:3 on all of your videos.

Frame rate depends a lot on the actual content of the video. Use 30 frames per second if you don't have much movement in your video. 60 frames per second is a good option if you have lots of movement e.g. people walking/running.

Optimization tools

There are various tools you can use to optimize your videos. We have found Handbrake to work really well for our video optimization needs. We have also made a step-by-step guide on how to optimize your videos using the tool. See: How to use HandBrake

Examples of optimization/converting tools:

• Cloud Convert (web-based tool)
• Handbrake (desktop tool)