Do you want to attach videos to emails so that you can share them with others, or maybe even send them to your email marketing list?
Before you go any further you should know that not only will your video need to be optimized, but there are some fairly big challenges that you’ll need to overcome – if it is even possible in the first place.
What is Required to Optimize Videos for Email
Attachments
If you’re going to be sending videos as email attachments, the optimization that you perform needs to focus on two main areas:
Compatibility
It is important that the video that you attach can be viewed by the recipient on the device or platform that they’re using.
Nowadays that includes a significant number of recipients who check their email on mobile devices, and that could complicate things further.
The safe format for compatibility is MP4 with H.264.
File size
The biggest challenge of vxe for email attachments is the fact that email servers have attachment file size limitations.
The exact limitation varies from server to server, but your video file size needs to be small enough to get through your email servers limitation as well as your recipients.
In short you will need to err on the side of caution, which really means getting your video under 10MB – unless are attaching it to a specific recipient and both you and them have a higher attachment file size limit.
Odds are you should be starting to see how tricky it can be to optimize videos in this way.
Still, there are a few options that you can try.
How to Reduce the File Size of Videos
Overall your goal should be to get your video as small as possible in order to fit into the file size limitation.
It should be noted that before you begin you should consider whether or not that is feasible in the first place.
For example if you have a 15 second video it might be, but if your video is
30 to 40 minutes – it probably won’t.
The fact of the matter is that when you are reducing the file size of your video so significantly, its quality will be affected.
As such you can only reduce it so much before it becomes unwatchable.
Some of the options that you could try include:
Trim out everything but the essentials
Try to shorten your video by trimming out everything but the essentials.
Although this may not be a suitable option for all videos, if it is you should use it to get your video as short as you can.
Naturally you won’t want to trim out too much and risk the video losing its message – but if you can shorten the video even by a little bit it could make a difference.
Downscale the resolution
The higher your resolution the higher the file size will need to be, so you may want to downscale it.
That is especially the case if your resolution is high (e.g. 1080p or 4K), in which case reducing it to 480p (or lower) may help significantly.
Make no mistake this will affect the video quality, but that is going to be affected anyway and the difference won’t be that noticeable at the end of the day.
Reduce the video bitrate
The main way to shrink the video file size down to 10MB or less is to reduce the video bitrate.
However there is only so much you can reduce it before compression artifacts appear and its quality deteriorates to the point that it is unwatchable.
It would be best to adjust the bitrate gradually, and observe its impact on the quality as you do.
Final Words
As you can see optimizing videos to send as email attachments is no simple matter, and it isn’t always going to be feasible.
Nowadays you should be able to easily find a free MPG to MP4 converter that you can use to switch it to that format if need be.
Instead of attaching your files however you could embed HTML5 videos or insert cloud storage links – which will allow you to send far larger video files, just not in the form of actual attachments.