How to reduce good quality video size?

My question is how to reduce the size of videos and maintain a good image quality, or how not to record heavy videos that are good in quality. The fact is that if I record videos with my cell phone (Huawei p8 lite 2017) even only in VGA 640x480 (4: 3), a one-hour video is still more than 1 Gb in size, but still gives an unsightly " Pixel mud ". I mean if you download a YouTube video, for example, in a much better picture quality, you only have about 1-1.5 mb per minute (eg a 25 min video in HD with approx. 230 mb). The same also applies to my digital camera from Sony Cybershot.

Can someone help me and explain what I should consider when recording or anything else?

You can do that with programs that can "transcode".
https://handbrake.fr/ is a free example of something like that. (User interface is also available in German!)
https://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/de/product/tmsr5.html a good, but paid program. Maybe a little overpowered for use.

Before you get started, I would like to recommend the basics of https://encodingwissen.de/.
They contain a lot of important information on the subject.

Sorry, I missed the addition "Mac".
To make a long story short: Macs is usually used for professional editing software. And even there I noticed a tendency for users to switch to Windows. (Simply the price / performance ratio!)

Thanks for the recommendations. By the way, I also have Final Cut Pro X, does it help?

Videos on YouTube are specially compressed with YouTube's Kompremier algorithm.

Hir a vodeo by Tom Scott who can explain it a little more precisely:

If you record a raw file, your program will take 60 pictures per second, if a picture is 100 kb in size, it is 6 seconds in size and so on. With an editing program there are also algorithms that take apart the videos and "cut away" unnecessary information, which is usually a small loss of quality for smaller files. This is the so-called bit rate that you assign to a video so how many 1 and 0 may my video have per second.

Although everything is written in theory, I hope it helps with understanding.

I don't know Final Cut personally - but it has a lot of fans.

It depends on the source material and the coding settings within the software how good the result will be.
So you can't expect miracles from 640x480 in terms of image resolution and quality compared to 1980x1080.

In short: There's no way around the "basic study" on encoding knowledge (or similar sites) if you want to know what affects how.

1MB per minute is by no means realistic for a video on which you should at least see something vaguely. A poor quality MP3 audio file with 128kbps is about this size, but there's no picture yet.

How much a video can be compressed without a major loss of quality depends very much on how much movement there's in the image. A lecture filmed from a tripod, in which a person stands and talks as if rooted on the stage, can be compressed many times more with the same quality than e.g. A roller coaster ride.

The qualitatively pretty best H.264 encoder there's FFmpeg, on top of that it is even open source, so free.

My specific recommendation:
Download the FFMPEG Batch AV Converter:
https://sourceforge.net/...peg-batch/

Drag your original videos into the field above.
In the "Parameters" field below you delete everything that may be inside and add the following:

-c: v libx264 -preset medium -crf 28 -c: a aac -b: a 128k

In the small field "Format" next to it you write mp4.
You leave everything else as it is.
Then you click on the green "Start sequential".

Then just have a look, 1. Whether the duration of the encoding is ok for you, and 2. Whether the quality and size fit.

You can change the compression by changing the crf value, which we have now set to 28. The larger the value, the smaller the file and the poorer the quality. The possible value is between 0 and 51.

If the coding takes too long, you can exchange the word medium for fast, faster or veryfast. Then the coding goes faster, but the quality gets worse with the same file size. If you have a lot of time and want to get the best possible quality, you can also write in slow, mostly is medium or almost a very good compromise between quality and duration.

I think it helped me a lot, thank you!

Thank you very much!

It's called compressing and not compressing.

The bit rate or size of the file does not always have something to say. Perhaps the cell phone relies on particularly fast compression, which causes many artifacts. In the digital camera it may be that a special chip does the work faster and therefore compresses better.

And it also depends on the compression process. Newer methods such as H265 or Youtubes VP9 Codec offer higher quality at lower bit rates.

If you want to compress video efficiently, download a program like Handbrake and convert the videos to the size you want.