Why are my iPhone’s videos so large?

[jmt356]

Why are my iPhone’s videos so large?
Even when I set my iPhone’s videos to the smallest size available, the .MOV files produced are around 80 mb per minute recorded. Why are they so large? A one-hour video is about 5 gb! All I need is a couple of hours of video and my computer’s entire hard drive will be filled. How can I efficiently get the video size down once I copy them onto my laptop?

 

[DaveM]

Sorry to report that what you're experiencing is just the nature of video. A 1280 x 720 .MOV video, which is what size you're likely recording at, will be just under 78 MB per minute. Of course you can use converter software to convert to a different format once it's on your computer, but even the most efficient formats will need over 4 GB per hour of hard disk space, and .MOVs are pretty efficient. Converting can have a significant effect on quality and you'll probably not see much, if any, space savings. If you're going to be saving a lot of video it's probably time to invest in a dedicated hard drive just for that purpose. 2 TB or higher drives are now available, in either internal or external form.