Michelle writes, “How do I send a video from my digital camera through my Hotmail account?”
My #1 recommendation to anyone who wants to send video as an email attachment is don’t send video via email. Even on high speed broadband connections sending a several megabyte video takes a long time to send, potentially clogs the receiver’s inbox, and might get blocked by content filters on their mail server. You are almost always better off to upload the video to a free hosting service like YouTube and send the email recipient a link to the video.
If you absolutely cannot be dissuaded from sending a video as an email attachment, open a new message in the Hotmail interface and choose Attach > File from the menu and browse to your video. Keep in mind there’s a 25MB limit for attachments in Hotmail and follow these guidelines:
Best Practices for Sending Video Via Email
Use a lower resolution file: Most iPhone and Android smartphone cameras record video at either 1080p or 4k.
If you send video as an email attachment, you will need to save it at a lower quality to keep it under the 25MB maximum file size. If you have an iPhone, you can open the file in iMovie and then save it as a lower quality. Either 540p or the lowest setting 360p might be required to achieve that small file size.
Avoid Special Effects and Transitions If this is a video you made with a video editing app, don’t use creative effects and transitions. They bloat the file size of your video and make it more likely you’ll hit the 10MB limit.
Target a Specific File Size As you’re exporting a movie from your favorite editing application, you can specify a file size. Ideally you should try to stay in the 4-5MB range, unless you know for certain that the person on the other end of your message has room for plenty of video in their inbox. When you do this, the software automatically picks the resolution and frame rate best suited for your selected file size. You won’t get an outstanding looking video when doing this, but you will hit the required file size.
