Main image for Using Handbrake to Optimize Movies for Uploading to Vimeo Time to Read: ~1 min

I subscribe to Vimeo Plus, which limits my uploads to 5 Gig per week. Normally that amount of capacity does the trick, but I've also been doing some videos of my town's school music concerts. When those all come in a single week, whoa! I researched the options with Vimeo to upgrade or otherwise allow more upload capacity temporarily, and their response helpfully directed me to a section of their site that talked about optimizing your videos before uploading. You can check out their video on how to use Handbrake (download it, it's free!) prior to uploading your video. In my testing, I saw my file sizes drop by 60-80%, which is quite amazing when you have a 7 Gig video that you obviously can't upload with a 5 Gig cap. You can check out the whole video here, but I also wrote down the salient points and circled the options in the (as of this writing) Handbrake interface.

  • Codec H.264
  • Framerate same as source
  • Average bitrate 5000
  • 2-pass encoding yes
  • Audio 44.1 sample, 320 bitrate

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