What is a very big video?

Have you ever wondered what might be a very big video? Interestingly different people will tell you different things on the subject. For some saying that there is a 1GB video file means they just turned on the camera. For others, this means that the video is very long and will take a lot of your time.

The goal of this post is to tell you what makes the video big as well as introduce you to a new feature at Ziggeo.

What makes file a big file?

At the end of the day the video file is just a file. It has a name, extension and the specific way it is packaged as it is created. These wrappings within the file and the file data itself can make one file bigger or smaller.

There are also different ways of how these files are stored. This is true for servers as much as for your own desktops, laptops and mobile devices. These small options that are set for you within your operating system can make one file appear larger in one system and smaller in another.

It is always a fact however that more data you have in a file the larger it will be.

What affects video size?

We have covered this in our docs, where we mentioned bitrates, framerate and resolutions. These are quite important for a video. Higher resolutions require higher bitrates. Generally your video bitrate would increase while audio might not at all.

If you imagine the video to be an empty cup, the water that you add would be the bitrate. Framerate when changed would be a multiplier of that water. This is because the framerate tells how many times the video data will be drawn in a single second. So normal 25-30 when increased to 60 is double of the normal size - depending on the way the video was formatted.

With the mobile devices being more and more powerful it is very easy to see the now old videos of under 20MB being replaced by videos of several GB just because they were captured by a new 4K Android phone.

New Ziggeo feature

Having more and more devices with high quality cameras is something we pay attention to. We always look to be a step in front of the requirements and this new feature is exactly that. For many of our customers something they might use here and there, while for others a requirement.

Until today we have supported up to 5GB file uploads. That is a single file could have been only up to 5GB in size. Above that and it would not be accepted.

You could have of course been uploading 100 of 5GB files at the same time, it was just that 5GB seemed such a way above required mark.

Today we are happy to announce that we have lifted this limit. From today, using our latest release, you can upload up to 5TB files. That is, if you wanted, you could upload 100 or more 5TB files at the same time.

Processing Terabytes

As before, the videos first get uploaded. Once they are uploaded they go through the verification stages after which they are set to be processed. The processing itself happens in practically the same way as before. There is a difference though.

For the common, smaller files we have improved transcoding so that it is faster. The very very big files, even in the ranges of Gigabytes will be processed in the Ziggeo's award winning video processing manner that we have been using so far.

Get Your Upload Limit Increased

To do this, all you would need to do is to use v2-r41 or higher. That is it. Everything else is done for you automatically. So if you do not make any update and you are on stable, once it gets upgraded to new version you will automatically get the update for these files over 5GB in size.

If you can not wait, just grab the r41 or "latest" revision and enjoy. If you have any questions, just reach out to our support team.