Hi, I've been trying to make short clips from hentai using freemake video converter, but I usually end up with a very large file size. For instance, I was cuting a 1 min long clip from a hentai with original 640x480 resolution (quite small) and the file size was something like 60 mb, but here on gelbooru I find webm with longer duration, better resolution, very good quality and way smaller file size. How do you guys do it?

They're most likely using a different codec.

I have no idea what codecs freemake has or what options it has for them, so I can't really give any recommendations, but your best bet is to start researching codecs.

How does that work exactly? I just can't wrap my head around that the entire episode is 100mb and a few minutes of it are almost 60 mb. How can 1/11 of the episode be almost as large as the episode itself?

I think if you ensure that you use VP9 for video and Opus for audio you could slim file sizes without degrading quality. Try fucking around with ffmpeg or similar a command line encoding program.

That's because of compression.

Pretty much all video files are compressed. If they weren't compressed, they'd all be 3 bytes per pixel per frame just for the video, ignoring the audio. For a 1-minute 720p video at 24FPS, that works out to 3 bytes/pixel * (1280 * 720) pixels/frame * 24 frames/sec * 60 sec = 3 billion bytes. That's 3 gigabytes for a 1-minute audio less video.

There are different ways to compress video, and some compress the video better than others. You can generally choose how much to compress the video with each of these, since with a lot of types of compression, it causes a loss in quality.

When you re-encode the video, it doesn't care how big the old filesize was. It'll take the video, decompress it into that 3 bytes per pixel per frame, then recompress it it's own way, whether that had more or less compression than the original.

t123
In case you're not aware, I sent you a PM with some advice about this. Check your Inbox.

It's because the clip is being made with different settings than what the original video file was made with. With enough tweaking, you can make a clip that's 1/4th the length of the original, but with a file size that's twice as large.

The amount of space taken up by each second of video is determined through a variety of factors: bitrate, frames per second (fps), sample rate (for the audio anyway), video resolution, etc. If any one of these factors was different when making the clip compared to making the original file, it's going to result in a different file size per second of video. What's probably happening is the pre-configured settings for freemake's program are set up to require more space per second of video than whatever program was used to make the original video. This is likely to result in a better quality video (compared to the other program when operating on the same data; I don't mean it's going to magically make your video higher quality), but that comes at the cost of requiring more space because the two, for the most part, go hand in hand; the better the quality, the larger the file size.

In order to get a clip of acceptable quality with a small file size, you're going to have to edit some of these settings by hand assuming freemake's program does not have any kind of profile system. If that program won't let you edit any video settings (I haven't used it, but the website indicates that they don't cater to the technically inclined, so I won't be surprised if that is the case), you'll have to use something else. ffmpeg (avconv in the case of operating systems based on older Ubuntu versions) allows for the highest degree of configuration, but to use it by itself you'll need to use the command line and it requires a deeper understanding of the basic concepts surrounding video encoding (like what Jerl is talking about) for effective use. HandBrake is another good program which (like many others) has ffmpeg bundled with it and uses ffmpeg to do the actual video conversion while it just acts as a front-end to make ffmpeg easier to use.

Just use 2 pass encoding and set up CUDA(i hope you've got Nvidia card) in the freemake video converter settings, that's it.

Just tested, from 852x480 video --> got 1 min webm with 16 Mb size

Thanks for the help, I will try out the suggestions.