Video compression before uploading to Google Cloud Storage

Question

I am a bit confused when it comes to the size of a video. I am currently using a signedUrl in order to send the video from the client phone to the Google Cloud Storage bucket. The part I am confused is in regards to the size of the video. I noticed when I upload a video that is a minute long, the size is over 200mb. Is this normal? or is there a way to decrease the video size since it seems like the cost would be exponential if that was the case.

When retrieving a video currently I have it as

let result = await ImagePicker.launchImageLibraryAsync({
  mediaTypes: ImagePicker.MediaTypeOptions.Videos,
  allowsEditing: true,
  aspect: [4, 3],
  quality: 1,
  videoQuality: 6
});

The videoQuality at 6 from my understanding produces 1280 x 720 resolution. Is the resolution an issue?

Thanks in advance for advice/help in hopefully solving this issue or teaching me what to consider when dealing with videos and uploading them to the cloud (in regards to space and storage).

Answer 1

The videoQuality argument should be of type ImagePicker.UIImagePickerControllerQualityType as mentioned in the docs

The ImagePicker.UIImagePickerControllerQualityType currently has the following possible values as you can see in their repo :

export enum UIImagePickerControllerQualityType {
  High = 0,
  Medium = 1,
  Low = 2,
  VGA640x480 = 3,
  IFrame1280x720 = 4,
  IFrame960x540 = 5,
}

Thus, for a 1280 x 720 output, you should set videoQuality: 4

Moreover, if you would like to further reduce the size of your video files when uploading to Google Cloud Storage, you may want to look into the Decompressive transcoding feature , which automatically decompresses gzip files stored in GCS when they are requested (note that files should be compressed before storing in GCS).