by alandworsky » Wed Mar 04, 2020 10:42 am
Thanks so much to both of you for your replies! In answer to Steve's question: I'm putting the limitation on myself. I didn't want my customers to have to wait too long for the downloading process to be completed, especially because many are in countries outside the U.S. where their internet speeds aren't that great. My website in on Shopify, and when a customer orders a video the download is handled by a related company called Fetch where the files reside. Fetch puts an overall limit on the amount of data I can keep on its server and if I go over that amount (now 35 gigs) I have to pay them a higher monthly fee. So I do have an incentive to keep the total size of my files within that limit.
Before I started making and rendering the videos myself in Sony Vegas, I got help from a video editor who would create the files on a Mac with Final Cut. When he was done, a one-hour video created a 1 gig file (although I have no idea how he did this from a technical standpoint) and it seemed like the quality was OK. With my current settings in Vegas, each one-hour video ends up being about 3 gigs. So I thought there might be a preset template that would produce decent quality in a file size about 1/3 of my current template.
After digesting the feedback I've gotten here, my next experiment is going to be to simply reduce the bitrate on my current template from 10,000,000 to 4,000,000 and then see what the quality looks like. I'll keep you posted.
Thanks again!