i’ve been playing around with video encoding and it appears that i may have finally found my workflow. youtube supports the uploading and streaming of 1080p videos. at first, i thought that this would be great because my target resolution is 1080p anyway. i want to burn blu-rays and so keeping the resolution as high as possible seemed like a good idea.

what i did not realize was just how much larger a 1080p video is versus a 720p video. it is insane how quickly these files get big. i just edited a 1 minute 38 second video and the 720p version is 169.3MB. i think the problem is in large part the codec i’m using and i’m sure that i can compress the video further, but i’m a little hesitant to be too aggressive here because i want to maintain as much quality as i can. for kicks, i encoded the same 1:38 video at 1080p and the resulting file was 590.4MB. there’s just no way that i’m going to be able to store all of this video on my hard drive locally.

for youtube, i am going to upload 720p versions of the video, but i think that i’m going to have to keep the 1080p versions of the edited video as my source to burn blu-rays. that just means that i’m going to have to encode twice, once for youtube and once for media. not a perfect solution, but i think i’m starting to figure out the workflow.

and all this just for home movies of kyden!