admin 6 years
The only instance where this would be practically true would be when you're working with uncompressed video footage - quite rare if you already have a video file. There are many video codecs which will work to encode the video data in highly efficient ways, but that's the work of the codec, and it will always be a balance between high quality and low file size. Videos that are already encoded in a relatively modern codec (say h264) are so well compressed that putting them into a .zip file barely saves a byte because there so little repeated data that it can work with. Basically, if the video file you're working with has already been encoded in the last 15 years; you're going to have to reduce the quality to make any noticeable difference to file size. There's many exceptions to the above, but that's the more often than not scenario. Keen to see others' input, as video encoding is what most of our contributors know a lot about!The only instance where this would be practically true would be when you're working with uncompressed video footage - quite rare if you already have a video file.

There are many video codecs which will work to encode the video data in highly efficient ways, but that's the work of the codec, and it will always be a balance between high quality and low file size. Videos that are already encoded in a relatively modern codec (say h264) are so well compressed that putting them into a .zip file barely saves a byte because there so little repeated data that it can work with.

Basically, if the video file you're working with has already been encoded in the last 15 years; you're going to have to reduce the quality to make any noticeable difference to file size.

There's many exceptions to the above, but that's the more often than not scenario. Keen to see others' input, as video encoding is what most of our contributors know a lot about!