Marketing videos are an excellent way to promote your message, an ideal part of a marketing plan. After you create or edit a marketing video you will have to choose a format to encode it in. The exact range of formats that are available will depend on the software you’re using, but in most cases there are likely to be a number of different options.
If you’re trying to decide which format is the ‘best’ one for your marketing videos, be sure to base your decision on how it is going to be used. In particular there are several ways in which marketing videos are normally used that may play a part in your choice:
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Uploading and publishing videos on online platforms
If you intend to upload and publish your marketing videos on online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, or anything else – the format should be based on the recommended settings of that platform. Each platform tends to prefer certain formats, and for example YouTube’s recommended settings require that you use MP4 with H.264.
To be perfectly honest most online platforms right now prefer MP4 with H.264 – but it doesn’t hurt to check nonetheless. By uploading the video in the right format you can avoid any issues, and it won’t have to be transcoded after it is uploaded – which could affect its quality.
Distributing video files through various channels
Assuming you want to distribute the actual video file through various channels, the main factor you need to consider is compatibility. Because you aren’t going to be able to identify the devices or platforms that will be used to watch your videos, you need to select a format that is widely supported.
Nowadays the best format for that is MP4 with H.264. Videos encoded in it can be viewed without any issues on the vast majority of devices and platforms.
Burning video DVDs
Although this is a fairly dated option, if you want to burn your marketing videos onto a video DVD – you need to use the MPEG-2 format. Suffice to say it is the format that is required by most DVD players, and so it is really the only option available.
Minimizing the file size
In some cases you may want to minimize the file size of your marketing videos, so that they consume less bandwidth, or to overcome specific file size limitations such as the one on email attachments. Ideally it would be best if you could use a format that provides better compression rates, and for example if you use H.265 instead of H.264 the file size could be up to 50% smaller.
As a general rule, newer video codecs have better compression rates than their older counterparts. However by that same token newer video codecs tend to have less support – so you’ll need to factor that in as well.
If you’ve already encoded your video into a format, you can always transcode it using a MPG to MP4 converter, or one for other formats. For example you could try Movavi Video Converter, but remember to keep a copy of the original video so that you don’t end up repeatedly transcoding the marketing videos and causing their quality to deteriorate.
See how you can decide on the best format for your marketing videos based on how they’ll be used? Be sure to stay abreast with new formats as they’re released, as it is likely some of the formats mentioned above may be supplanted at some point or other.
