

If you just want to look at it, it’s also on YouTube. To get some real numbers, I downloaded 4K Sample2.mp4 from the Samsung section of Ashok Patel’s AppsLoveWorld website, which offers a few free mp4 video files for testing or demo purposes. If you wanted to customise the video for a Windows laptop with a screen resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels (1MB per screen), you could make it much smaller. Even with compression, 30 frames per second adds up. Your Samsung Galaxy S10 can shoot videos at an even higher resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels or UHD (ultra-high definition), where a full screen image needs 8,294,400 pixels or 7.9MB – more than six times as much. Photograph: Jack Schofield/YouTubeĪ standard computer screen with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 shows 1,310,720 pixels, which is 1.25MB. The resolution of the video – the number of pixels on screen at any one time – has a huge impact on the resulting file size, but also how good it looks on modern screens. However, losing a 2GB video of your holiday or a kid’s birthday party will hurt more than losing the odd photo.

Of course, this also applies to personal photos and audio files. Always keep external backups of original files, and always work with copies. In the long run, you will need every pixel you can get.īefore we get to the details, a warning: never edit an original video file. So, always shoot at the highest resolution that’s practical, and keep it. Screen resolutions keep increasing, and 640 x 480-pixel VGA videos that used to fill a screen now look tiny on today’s 3840 x 2160-pixel 4K screens. You can also use cheap or free online storage at sites such as pCloud, Mega.nz, MediaFire and Yandex.Disk.

Disk drives are cheap, and a £70 4TB drive can hold thousands of videos. In general, however, it’s a bad idea to reduce the size of irreplaceable videos just to save space. You might want to send the video to someone else reducing the file size will reduce the upload and download times. You might also want to fit several videos on a device with limited storage, such as a smartphone or tablet, or an optical disc such as a CD-Rom or DVD. For example, you might want to customise a high-resolution video for a low-resolution screen. There are some good reasons for reducing video file sizes.
