Reducing the Size of Movies

FotoByFriend

I made the mistake awhile back of shooting some movies (with my Olympus camera in digital mode) at such high resolution that the flix ended up as being HUGE files -- the largest at over 327 megabytes! The total for the seven movies came out to 1.41 gigabytes! It took HOURS to upload them to my SmugMug site, and this was with two of them not making it! Ye gads! So here is what I was able to figure out as a way of easily reducing the file-size of any given movie BEFORE uploading it to SmugMug: (1) Click on the file to bring it to ready-to-play mode. (2) File > Export for Web; check “Desktop” only and select destination folder. (3) Click on “OK” and wait for the export process to finish. (4) In the destination folder you will get a FILE FOLDER containing the desired reduced movie -- along with a too-small reference movie, a poster and (with my account, anyway) a Yahoo! “ReadMe” document; save the desired movie and delete the rest (the last three items). (5) After you make sure the newly reduced movie plays OK, you can then DELETE the original too-huge flick. Now, all this may indeed be old-hat to a lot of users, but -- though I have had four decades of photography experience, including a number of years as a full-time pro -- I am a bit of a neophyte when it comes to movies, especially of the digital variety. Maybe this info will prove helpful to others similarly occasionally clueless!