Previously, we have mentioned several software for video editing, compression and even conversion. One thing that we didn’t touch on was video resizing. While there are plenty of video editing software out there (both free and commercial), not all of them support video resizing. Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker is one of those without the video resizing feature. In addition, for those video editors that come with video resizing feature, it is always embedded deep in the settings and is not available in the frontend.

In this tutorial, let’s see how you can resize your video in various OS.

Note: The meaning of “resize” in this article is referring to the display size of the video, not the file size.

Linux (illustrated with Ubuntu)

Avidemux, Openshot, Kdenlive are some of the video editors in Linux, but the one that we are going to use is PiTiVi. The reason is because this is the default video editor in Ubuntu Lucid (and above). Sorry to non-Ubuntu users.

In PiTiVi, first import in your clip.

Next, go to Project -> Project Settings. Under the Video Output section, select “Custom” from the dropdown field.

You should be able to set the video’s width, height and frame rate.

Next, proceed on to edit your video. Once you are done, click the “Render Project” button to save your video.

Windows

In Windows, other than the Windows Movie Maker, the next popular free video editor is Virtualdub. Unlike WMM, it supports video resizing and doesn’t require installation.

1. Download VirtualDub. Extract the zip file and run the VirtualDub application.

2. Go to “Video -> Filter“.

3. Click “Add”. Scroll down the list until you find the entry “Resize”. Select it and click OK to add it.

4. In the next window, you will be able to change the size of the video. You can use either absolute sizing or relative sizing. I would recommend using “relative (%)” as it will retain the aspect ratio of the video.

5. Once you are done editing your video, go to “File -> Save As AVI” to export your video.

Mac

iMovie is a great software for video editing, and the best of all, it is pre-installed in Mac.

Open your iMovie. Import your media clips and do your editing. After you are done editing the video, go to “Share -> Export to QuickTime“.

Click on the Options button.

Under the Video section, click on the Size button

In the Dimensions dropdown field, select Custom. You should be able to set your video size now.

That’s it.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave your comments below.

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In this post, we’ll teach you exactly that. We’ll be using an open source application called Virtualdub to compress a video file while still retaining the quality of the original.

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for Windows. It is free and open source and is released under the GNU GPL license.

To get started with using Virtualdub, download and install it from virtualdub.org. By default, Virtualdub does not come with any video compression codecs built in, because of licensing restrictions. You can however get started by downloading the Xvid codec from www.xvid.org. This is the format that we will compress our video to.

Once you have the codec installed, launch Virtualdub and click ctrl+O to load the uncompressed video. Virtualdub should load the video and you should see a screen similar to the one below.

This is called the timeline view.

A video format like the .avi that I have loaded here has two parts, the video part and the audio part and we can treat both parts seperately for compression. To give an idea about the level of compression we achieve, the uncompressed file is about 716MB in size. We’ll look at the size of the compressed file once we’re done with the process.

Click on Video and chose the Compression option (Or click ctrl+P). From the list of Codecs displayed on the left side of the window, choose the “Xvid MPEG-4 Codec” and click on

Configure

.

The only option that you need to worry about in the Configure window is the Target bitrate.  When you open this window for the first time, you will see a default value in it which is the bitrate of the original file. Mine was 700 kbps. I changed it to 300 kbps. 300 is a decent enough bitrate if you’re producing video for the web and are concerned about the size of the file, which is what this tutorial is about, right ?

Click on Ok and come back to the time-line view.

Now, we need to select a compression codec for the Audio part of the file. From the Audio menu, select the option titles “Full processing mode“. Now, select Audio again and click on Compression.

From the list of Audi codecs, choose MPEG Layer-3 and click on Ok to get back to the time-line view.

Now, to create the compressed file, choose the File->Save as AVI option and give a new name for the compressed file. Virtualdub should now start saving the compressed file to your chosen location.

After the compression process is done, you can check out the size of the new file.

Isn’t that amazing ?

The compressed file will, obviously, be of slightly lower quality but I’m sure you can live with that, considering the huge savings in space.

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