There are many reasons why you might want to resize your videos, and in this post I’m going to mention a couple of free apps that can help you easily change the resolution of your videos. If you own one of these 1080p 60fps HD camcorders, you understand the need for some serious conversion. With 4K camcorders on the market, you’ll need a computer with a 4K monitor to even be able to play videos in such high quality
Windows currently has no built-in default tools that can be used to resize videos. You can use Windows Movie Maker to edit videos, add transitions, and more, but not to change the actual video resolution.
If you search for “RESIZE VIDEO†on Google, you will get a list of many commercial applications that you will have to shell out money for! So if you’re in luck that you’ve stumbled upon this post, I’ll show you some free ways to quickly and easily resize a video.
handbrake
HandBrake is my favorite video converting and encoding utility. Basically, it can take almost any video file you can add to it as input, and gives you two output options: MP4 and MKV. You can also choose from three video codecs for two video containers: H.264, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2.
In HandBrake, you can select a preset by clicking the Toggle Presets button that appears on the right. If you are not interested in any of these elements, you can leave the default value “Normal” under the heading “Normal”.
To get started, simply click the Source button and select a video file. You can change the destination, format and video codec if you like, but if you are only interested in changing the video resolution, leave the values ??alone. Now click on the Image Settings button at the top.
Here you can change the width of the video and it will automatically adjust the height to keep the aspect ratio. At this point, you don’t need to do anything other than click the Start button. If you want to convert multiple video files at the same time, you can click the Add to Queue button and then click the Source button again to select another video. Keep adding to the queue and when done click “Start”.
You will see the conversion progress at the bottom of the program window. The amount of time will depend on the original size and encoding of your video.
VirtualDub
VirtualDub is a free video capture and processing application. It lacks many of the video editing features found in Adobe Premiere, but is optimized for very fast linear video manipulation. It also has batch processing capabilities to handle large numbers of video files.
You can do LOTS of things with VirtualDub, including adding special effects to your videos, such as blur, black and white, swipe, and more. However, we will only cover how you can use it to resize your videos. It should be noted that VirtualDub works best with AVI files and will require additional codecs to be installed to work with other file types such as AVCHD, MP4, etc.
First download VirtualDub and unzip it to a folder on your hard drive. VirtualDub does not require installation; it just runs directly through the EXE! This means it doesn’t interfere with your registry or anything else in Windows.
Once installed, launch the program by clicking the VirtualDub icon. You will get a blank screen with some controls at the bottom. I am assuming that you already have a video that you want to resize, so first click File and select Open Video File.
Find the location with your video and open it. Now you will see your video appears twice in the main window. This is because the left one is considered your original and the right one is your “revised” or modified version. When you apply a filter to your video, the correct filter is updated and you can watch both at the same time! Cool!
Now they are both the same because nothing has been done. So now that the video is imported, go to the Videos section and click on Filters.
Click the Add button on the right and scroll down until you see the resize.
Click OK and you will be taken to the resize filter options. Don’t be intimidated by this screen, if you’ve never heard of most of the things listed, neither will I! What interests you is the top section where you select the new size. You can choose an absolute size and enter it manually if you like, or you can specify a size relative to the current size.
Go ahead and choose how you want to resize the video. If you know you want it to be 640×480, click Absolute and enter it yourself, otherwise choose Relative. I make mine 50% less. There are tons of other options in the list, such as adding a frame or changing the aspect ratio of the video, but you can just leave that unchanged if you just want to resize. Click OK and then OK again.
You should now see the original video on the left and the processed video on the right, in my case half the size!
Now, to save the resized video, click “File” and select “Save as AVI”. And it’s all! Go ahead and play the video and it should be in higher or lower resolution! How easy it is!
Freemake Video Converter
I would recommend Freemake Video Converter over VirtualDub because it accepts so many different video formats as input, but I am deliberately listing it last because there is a lot of unwanted software in the installer. It’s not malware or spyware, it’s just junk that you don’t want on your system.
When installing the program, make sure that you have selected the “Custom installation” radio button and do not want to install multiple programs. This is also cheating because they intentionally make this switch gray like you can’t press it. However, when you press a switch it becomes active, so don’t be fooled.
Anyway, apart from that, the program works fine and contains no ads, malware, spyware, etc. First, click the big add video button to select the video file you want to convert.
You will see the video load into the main window and at this point you can choose from a variety of options at the bottom. You will also see a button on the right with a green play icon and scissors on it. If you click on that, you can do basic video editing, including cutting and rotating the video.
To choose a new size for your video, you first need to select an option like Apple, MP4, WMV, AVI, etc. If you click for example MP4, you will get a popup with some preset values, or you can choose own value by clicking Add Preset.
Here you can select one of the preset sizes again, or click “Custom” and then enter your width and height. You can also adjust the frame rate, bit rate, video codec, audio channels, and more.
I really like this program because it has tons of options that will allow you to download videos to almost any device you can think of. I just wish they were trying to bundle this shit together with an installer! You can even send videos directly to YouTube, convert to HTML5 compatible format, convert to Xbox and Playstation format, and even burn to DVD or Blu-ray disc directly from the program. If you’re an Apple user, you’ll love the option at Apple, which lets you choose exactly which device the video will play on.
So, these are some good options for getting your video with a size and resolution that your computer, device, or online service can handle. Thus, HandBrake is best for converting to Apple compatible devices, VirtualDub can work on any file, but you need to install codecs for certain file formats, and Freemake works for everything, but you must avoid unwanted software when installing. It. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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