Animated map file size

[johnecc]

Hi all

Had my first go at animated maps yesterday. I took a 90second animated map, with sound, in 1080p, mp4 format, and converted it to webm vp8 using handbrake. The initial mp4 file was around 74mb, and after conversion, and removing the sound track, the webm file came out at around 200mb.

This is WAY more than the recommended <=10mb recommended in the wiki. Any ideas on how to reduce it dramatically?

[ddavison]

You can try this batch file if you are Windows to see if you get good results and a smaller file size.

Pre-requisites:

• Must be reasonably comfortable navigating directories and running stuff from command prompts
• Download and install ffmpeg
• https://ffmpeg.org/download.html#build-windows
• Create a .bat file with the following code. I called it convert_single_animation_to_webm.bat. Change the path to ffmpeg in your script.

@echo off

set INPUT_FILE=%1

if "%INPUT_FILE%"=="" (
    echo Please provide the input file name as a command-line parameter.
    exit /b 1
)

if not exist "%INPUT_FILE%" (
    echo The specified file does not exist.
    exit /b 1
)

mkdir webm

C:\Users\ddavi\Downloads\ffmpeg-6.0-full_build\bin\ffmpeg -i "%INPUT_FILE%" -vcodec libvpx  -pix_fmt yuva420p -auto-alt-ref 0 ".\webm\%~n1.webm"

Usage:

• 1. Place .bat file into the current folder or put it in a folder that you will reference later, such as c:\temp. My examples will assume it is in c:\temp
• 2. Hit the window key and type in cmd to open a windows Command Prompt
• 3. Navigate to the hard drive where you have your images, such as C:
• 4. Navigate to the folder where you keep your webm files (example: cd "c:\Users\bobjones\Documents\myimages")
• 5. Convert the animation to webm (Ex syntax: c:\temp\convert_single_animation_to_webm.bat test.avi
• 6. Find the converted files in a subfolder called "webm"

[Vass_Dts]

Alternatively you can try using Shutter Encoder, @johnecc.
https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/
It kinda became to go-to up for FGU users for various reasons. It's generally our prime recommendation at the academy.

Having said that, 90 seconds is a pretty long vid. I regularly use 4k animated maps that are about 8 to 15 MB in size, but, they are about 10 seconds long. Despite that, 200MB sounds way too big for a 1080p WebM that was originally a 74mb MP4. Something may have gone wrong in that conversion.