Compression

Some digital files can be very large; it can be useful or necessary to compress them for ease of storage or delivery. However, while compression can help save space it can also slow down or delay the opening of the file. 

when we are in editing mode on a video through any software, the final video must be exported so that it can be viewed through different software, if you fail to compress your video in the correct format then it may fail to play on certain types of players, for example, apple does not allow flash files to run on their iOS operating systems, so choosing the format you compress into is very important. 

There are 8 file formats, there are;

H.264, JPEG, TIFF, MPEG2/4, FLV, GIFF, Microsoft AVI and Quick Time

Importance when compressing

Firstly we need to know that there are two main formats when it comes to compressing, and these are File format and Video format. 

File format is the main decision maker which decides what type of player will be able to understand and play your video file. 

The video format decides the type of player that will be able to understand and play your video file and the quality of your video. 

We need to know this because we need to understand that there is no one format that works on everything, 

flash works on most browsers but not on iPhone or iPad, this basically tells us that before compressing a video we need to know the platform it is going to be played on so we can chose the appropriate file/video format (video codec).