Android Video App?

[Hellfury]

Greetings,

Trying to find a good video recording app for our kindergarten, ideally one that will have a lot of various size options, videos will probably be uploaded to assorted internal and external systems and sent to parents, so need to be easy to use and support various resolutions and good selection of codecs so we can make relatively small video files but also long ones. Ideally a free app without too much creepy monitoring, but paid is an option if it is good. (though I suspect it'll mostly be used to upload to facebook and sent by e-mail or their internal e-learning platform)

The phones used in the kindergarten are primary Samsung Galaxy S6s and Sony xperia Compact Z5 and Compact X, running Android 5.x/6.x if memory serves.

(I hope that was technical enough a description, I know very little about video encoding).

In advance, many thanks.

[The Stig]

Interesting question, I'll take a shot.

Howcome you want an app specifically? The default/provided should be plenty good and easy to use.
Don't worry about codecs in my opinion, that's too advanced for what you are trying to accomplish. They're generally good enough. I recommend 720p for (very) long videos, 1080p for short ones. Plus, when you upload it, on youtube/facebook for example, it gets compressed anyway
I assume your Samsung S6 is 32gb only, you'll find yourself constantly emptying it. Compact Z5 and X is good, can fit memory cards up to 200gb up to it (128gb should be real cheap these days), but they can get hot. Shouldn't be a game breaker though.
The Sony phones has plenty of more toys (filters/effects) in my experience but if you just let it shoot by default it should suffice, unless it's for laughs I doubt you'll need to deploy them.

These aren't camcorders, so whatever format they're in (usually mp4) is the universally used/accepted. No need to dip into thinking codecs.

[Hellfury]

We've been having problems with sizing in the default app, no matter how we set the resolution, the video size in data gets big. To the point where I've been wondering if the change in settings aren't properly registering in the app or if something else is wrong (if I had presence of mind enough I would've written the details of an attempted small video down, will remedy that next week), but the video on at least the S6 comes out way big, I know Facebook/Youtube etc. compresses it further, but we'd like that part of the process to get done locally (for the aforementioned mailing and internal systems).

How large should a 1 minute 720p video recording be?

We have installed extra SD cards in all of them except the S6, if memory serves so the local storage isn't a problem, it's the later distribution. Due to Norwegian Privacy laws (and our internal processes), going via youtube or any kind of 3rd party storage/service provider isn't an option (the topic of the end e-mail provider of the recipient is a topic currently under discussion).

We don't need another video recording app as such, if we could get a video compression solution.

I guess the primary problem is that the size on the S6 we've been struggling with is large, way larger than we can practically deal with, and we need them smaller in data amount, was thinking codecs as a way to accomplish this.
even in 2017 a lot of services put maximum e-mail size with attachments at 10-20 MB, we can turn this off as much as we like, but the parents on the receiving end usually have less control on their infrastructure. And most will probably open this on their phones, which is a lot of data. So we need to shrink them!

[orinthia]

10 seconds of 720p video is roughly 14mb when captured with my phone (galaxy s5) so push that to 1 min and it's around 85mb. Other phones may have different recording qualities or settings that can be changed, but mine is this way by default. If you want these in smaller sizes, you will need to open them in some kind of movie making/editing software and adjust quality until satisfied, or record in lower resolutions (lowering res only does so much). There should be some free software around, not only for windows but also on android (have the phone do it heh).

Unfortunately I've not actually done editing like this outside of something super simple like windows movie maker, which microsoft has discontinued but still has available to download with some digging (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=255475, uncheck the other stuff in it, still works in win10). Using something like this will let you trim the videos and sizes down much easier (has a bunch of presets that work decently), though you probably won't get 720p that much smaller without resorting to really messing with codec settings and other programs (programs like handbrake can make dealing with codecs easier, but it still isn't "easy"). I've not used any android movie editing app though, so be careful about watermarks, time limits, or general shitware (I think adobe makes one on android but haven't looked at it).

[Hellfury]

10 seconds of 720p video is roughly 14mb when captured with my phone (galaxy s5) so push that to 1 min and it's around 85mb.

That sounds like about what we got out of it as well dtawise (with a disclaimer about my memory), thanks for confirming. I had forgotten all about the Windows Movie Maker and will give it a shot, thanks!

[The Stig]

Hm, get a decent PC (i7), install handbrake and give this tutorial a try: http://www.howtogeek.com/199637/use-...blet-or-phone/

Will work for most video formats; I believe mobile videos spit out mp4s these days. Play with the presets on the right, you can check the resolution it's going to create by doing to the picture tab. However, depending on the video length and setting, I would argue any space saved is negligible as it sometimes makes it larger in my experience.

One last thing you can try, download http://www.freemake.com/ Video Converter ** WARNING: MAKE SURE TO USE CUSTOM INSTALLATION METHOD TO NOT INSTALL ANNOYING SHIT ON PC ** and use the built in conversion options to re-encode a video for youtube; which in theory should use youtube's settings and compress it nicely.
Besides the warning above, it also slides in a new background task that runs on startup called productupdater.exe ... it's not intrusive and it monitors for updates for the app, but it uses fucking 50mb of ram, so I eliminated it and classified it as shitware. This will return each time you update the app. Besides that I've been using the app for 3 odd years and I like it. Even if you don't use the youtube option, you can recompress videos to a size of your choice (it'll adjust the bitrate of the video). If after some experimentation you can compress it to oblivion but still make the video look acceptable then I consider it a win.

[Hellfury]

oh, I was peripherally aware of Handbkrake, I shall definitively give that a shot, thanks a lot :D