My friend needs to send a large amount of video footage—about 2 terabytes worth, consisting of 3 hours of 4K video—to the police and his insurance company for an investigation regarding his stolen truck. He only needs to send 25 minutes of that footage to the insurance company. I suggested copying the footage onto a flash drive and uploading the 25 minutes to a cloud storage service like TeraBox. Is this a good approach, or is there a better method?
4 Answers
Instead of dealing with such massive files, your friend should use Handbrake to compress those videos down to a manageable size. If he re-encodes it to a modern codec like H.265, he might reduce it down to a couple of gigabytes without losing much quality at all.
Sending 3 hours of 4K footage electronically is unrealistic, even for someone with good internet. It might be better to save the files on an external hard drive and mail that. Using a portable SSD like Samsung or just a regular HDD with enough padding might be the safest bet. Just make sure it’s formatted as exFAT for compatibility.
Mailing it makes sense, especially since the recipients probably can't handle such large files online.
You could upload the video to YouTube and simply share the private link. That way, it’s convenient and you don’t have to deal with huge file sizes.
I've done this before without making it private. Just uploaded it and shared the link!
He should trim the video to the specific 25 minutes needed for the report. Using a video editor like DaVinci Resolve or even Handbrake can help him compact it further, maybe even down to 1080p. If it’s still too big, he can upload it to cloud storage and share the link with the insurance company.
Yeah, it doesn’t need to be in 4K, 1080p is totally fine for this!
That sounds like a smart move! Re-encoding would definitely help.