Using Handbrake to compress files

Compression is the process of taking something with a higher quality and reducing its size by getting rid of information. Why would we ever want to reduce our video’s quality? Well, as you’ll be keenly aware if you exported videos in ProRes from iMovie, master video copies are huge. Many websites (and other destinations – clients, for example), have file size limits that you’ll need to stick to. Keeping a master copy means that if the file size isn’t an issue, we can use the best copy of our video available. I promised I’d explain why ProRes files are so much larger, so here goes.

What is ProRes?

ProRes files are ginormous, and although we won’t get deep into the weeds of video compression, it’s useful to know why Best Quality (ProRes) video is so much larger than maxing out the video quality using iMovie’s Custom slider on export. A disclaimer to video experts: this is a massively...