Since video recording devices including cell phones continue to have higher and higher recording resolutions the size of generated videos tend to increase in size as well. For example just 1 minute of video recorded at 1080p (HD) takes up almost 130mb. There has not traditionally been any easy way to send these videos other than to upload to some type of video sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo. While this does work, sometimes the videos need to be more private or you would just like to email large videos to individual recipients.
While it is tempting to always record video at your devices highest resolution, keep in mind that it take up way more storage capacity to store. Some phones even have the ability to record in 4k, but you can easily eat up almost 400mb of storage per minute recorded.
Take a look at your intended audience and platform for your video. You can record in 1080p and get great quality, or you can even drop to 720p or lower and decrease the size of the video files even further.
There are many different file formats that videos can be saved as. If you intent is to share a video on the internet or send a video over email choose a file format and codec that compresses the video and saves space. Mp4’s are common file types for videos and do include compression in them. If you know that your recipient can view them you could also compress videos as h.264.
Even though videos are compressed some when they are encoded or saved as certain file types, you may be able to compress video files even further by zipping them. You can easily zip a video on Windows or Mac before you send them over email.