Video optimization
Videos are one of the biggest reasons many people go online. They don’t go to social media websites to check the various updates from friends because people don’t post like they used to. We used to share pictures from our family outings or the summer holiday we had saved up for a whole year. Some people still do that, but the number of posts has declined over the years. Those who used to post interesting updates from their lives now open the app to look at the thousands of short videos posted daily. And it is not just on media such as Facebook. TikTok has also become very popular over the years, and this one is specifically designed to show short videos. Of all the social media platforms focusing on video, YouTube is the biggest. I remember when I, as a young student in grade school, would see my friends go to YouTube at every chance they got. I didn’t understand why they did it. They always looked at videos of cats that did funny things or people who got hurt. I was much more into movies and tv series, so watching these amateur clips didn’t make sense to me. This has changed for me over the years, however, and today, I wouldn’t say I am any better.
I watch YouTube more frequently than I open my Netflix app. YouTube has become my entertainment system, and I have learned much from YouTubers (Professional people creating YouTube videos) over the years.
In this lesson, we will discuss videos on the internet, the pollution they cause, the fast-growing quality development, and how we can reduce the impact videos have.
Videos are heavy
In the previous lesson, we talked about images and how they have become the most used media on the internet. We also discussed how much an image weighs and how we can reduce this weight to minimize the pollution caused by images. We will now do the same, but we will talk about videos instead of photos.
If you have been following the development of videos over the years, then you know that the quality has been increasing drastically. I remember in 2016 when I lived in the Philippines. I had a YouTube traveling show where I would tour around Cebu. I focused on showing Scandinavian people how beautiful the Philippines is and helping them get more tourists. After the first season of my YouTube show, I traveled back to Denmark for a few months, and there I bought myself a new camera. It was a DJI Osmo that could record videos in 4K at 30 frames per second. The camera wasn’t cheap, and I wasn’t earning anything on the show, but it became a passion of mine, almost my identity.
Before shooting my videos in 4K, I would use my mobile phone, which was only 1080P (Full HD). When I switched, I quickly realized that my Macbook couldn’t hold as many raw videos as before. So I convinced myself to buy an external hard drive that would allow me to save more data. But the problem was that this hard drive also got filled up, so I had to buy another one. Instead of clips that would be approximately 300-600 megabytes, I was now looking at clips between 2-4 gigabytes. That is a significant decrease in the number of videos I could store on my hard drive. This was the first time I found myself thinking about the possible impact that video development has on the environment.
