Speaker 1: Hey guys, this is Charles with Shutterstock, and in this tutorial we're gonna be taking a look at Handbrake, which is a free open-source video transcoder. We'll look at how to use it and do some comparisons with other apps like Adobe Media Encoder. Now as I mentioned, Handbrake is a free open-source video transcoder. It can be downloaded from handbrake.fr, and it supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. It's really great for transcoding videos you want to upload online because of how efficient the encoder is. As a result, file sizes are absurdly small and the visual quality is still quite solid. While it can transcode video from nearly every format, Handbrake can only export to three different formats currently, and they are MP4, which you're probably familiar with, MKV, which is an open-source container format, and WebM, which is another open-source format specifically designed for playback on web browsers. We're gonna be focusing on the MP4 format since it's most popular and probably the most relevant to us. What makes Handbrake awesome is how it can encode MP4 files with an H.264 codec. It uses an open-source encoder known as X.264. If that all sounds a little confusing, to put it simply, Handbrake can compress MP4 files really efficiently and better than most encoders. Let's check out a quick comparison of an MP4 export between Handbrake and Adobe Media Encoder. I've got an example video of me talking on camera. It's 16 seconds long and is at 1080p at 24 frames per second. With Media Encoder, I exported an MP4 and used the preset Match Source Medium Bitrate, which we can actually see in the settings has a very low target bitrate of 3 megabits per second and a max of 6 megabits per second. The exported video file was 6.55 megabytes, which is pretty small. I then exported a video through Handbrake using the default fast 1080p preset. The exported video came in at 3.67 megabytes, which is almost half as small as the export from Media Encoder. And while playing the files back, there are really no visual differences. If you do start to pixel peep the Handbrake video frame by frame, you will start to see some more noticeable compression, but the important thing with this is it's not visible to the viewers during normal playback. And I didn't even notice it at all until I went back and zoomed in on the picture frame by frame. The file size reduction you get with Handbrake makes it ideal if you're gonna be hosting your own videos online or maybe for making a video background loop for a website. It can really help cut down on loading times and social media videos are another good use for Handbrake as those platforms tend to prefer smaller video sizes. And a lot of times file sizes on shorter videos are so small you could simply email them if you need to, which can be even faster than using a service like Dropbox or WeTransfer if maybe you need to send a quick screener to a client. Now let's jump into Handbrake and I want to show you guys around the interface and how you can quickly transcode videos with it. So right when we open Handbrake, we're gonna be prompted to add in a video file we want to transcode. You can either drag and drop it or select it over here. I'm just gonna drag and drop one in here. And once we do that, we'll be able to see a preview of our video and then you also have these tabs over here with a lot of different options. I'm gonna start here with the preset. You can see we have quite a few different presets. We have general and then there's a bunch for web like YouTube and Vimeo and then some for different devices like Android and Apple. Now the default preset is this fast 1080p 30 and I highly recommend at least starting with that and then you can make a few changes as you go along. And so we come down here to the summary, we're gonna see the format. So the current file we're gonna output to is gonna be an mp4. I have a few other options here but again probably mp4 is the most relevant to us. And then I want to skip a few of these and move over to the video tab because it's gonna have most of the options we want to deal with. So you can see we have video codec and the default here is h.264. There's a few others like h.265 but again this is being encoded with that x.264 process and it's really effective. Now the one thing you'll probably want to change with the fast 1080p 30 preset is the frame rate. Again that's defaulted at 30. So I'm gonna change this to be same as source just so it matches the clip I dragged in here. And we also have the option for constant and variable frame rate. So you can see Handbrake has the option to actually output your video with a variable frame rate which will save you even more when it comes to file size. You'd imagine if you had kind of a presentation type video where there's a lot of still images on the screen it could lower that frame rate quite a bit and save you a lot of size. But I'm actually gonna switch this to constant frame rate. Again just kind of match with my original video. Next we have the optimized video options here for the encoder preset and this is how fast our video is going to be encoded. The default for this is fast but we can actually lower this to a lower setting. And the benefit of this is the video will take a little bit longer to encode but because it's taking more time it'll be able to encode it more efficiently and hopefully reduce our file size even more. And even though again this is very slow for this type of video that I'm working with here a very short clip it might add maybe 30 seconds on to it. I'm sure we had quite a bit more on a very long video. But for something like this the time versus file size savings you're going to get is probably worth it. So I typically put this on very slow. Now I'm just gonna leave these other optimized video options as is, the defaults. And the next thing we need to look at is the quality. And the default will be this constant quality at 22. You have an option down here to add in the average bitrate if you want to change to that be more of a variable bitrate type encoding. I'm gonna leave it on this constant quality. And you can see we have this slider here we can move it up and down and we get different numbers up here. Again the default was 22. But the actual lower we bring this will be the higher quality it's encoded at. But that will also in turn mean the file size will be bigger. And if I move this all the way over to the end we're gonna see that it's gonna say this is going to be lossless when it's at zero. So we'll actually output the same size file or maybe even a bigger file because it's going to be a completely lossless video that it exports. And again I can bring this back down to the other side and this would be a much lower quality video but the file size would be much much smaller. Again I'm gonna leave this on the default of 22. If you're ever wondering what something does just hover your mouse over it in here and it's really good about popping up a lot of information. You can read about it and it'll kind of give you a nice explanation of whatever you're looking at. Finally let's look over to the audio tab really quickly. The only thing I typically change on the audio is this bitrate here. I like to bump this up to 320 from the default 160. And before we encode you may want to go ahead and select where you want your file to save to. You can see it says save as and you just like browse here. That will open up the Explorer so you can navigate to where you want to save it to and you can rename it. I'll just go ahead and click save. And then when you're ready to export just go ahead and click start encode. And I'll just do this in real time you see how long this is taking. Not long at all for this short clip. And again this is with the very slow encoding pass. And now that has completed. And whenever you're done with all that if you want to open up a new file just come over here to open source. Go ahead and click that and you're right back to where you were in the very beginning. And just following back with the clip I just exported the original file was 10 seconds long and 117 megabytes. And now this clip that we just exported is 3.65 megabytes. And you can see it's a really nice visual quality clip. So again this is perfect for something on the web. Now one last thing it's important to note and that is that Handbrake actually exports mp4s with the extension m4v. Now I actually had to dig into their documentation to see why that is. And it's really just so the file is more compatible with QuickTime and QuickTime based apps. They also state in the documentation that a m4v file is exactly the same as an mp4. And you can simply change the extension from m4v to mp4 if you prefer and the file will work just fine. Alright guys hope you enjoyed this video taking a look at Handbrake. If there's any other software you would like us to take a look at let me know in the comments. I'll catch you guys on the next one.