Publication venues in robotics often allow supplementary video submissions. There are often strict size limits on video submissions. To meet these limits, it’s often necessary to compress the video.

I used to compress my videos using Compressor after making my videos with iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Now I just use ffmpeg to compress my videos. I share/export the video from Final Cut Pro and then use this command to compress it:

ffmpeg -i VIDEO.mov -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 VIDEO_COMPRESSED.mov

The -crf flag specifies the compression factor and it ranges from 0 (lossless) to 51 (worst quality), with 23 as the default. If I’m trying to get under a size limit, I’ll run the command multiple times, playing with this value until I meet the requirement.

ffmpeg can also be used for converting between video formats, trimming, cropping, etc. Hope this helps!