[FFmpeg-user] Shrinking video files

[Cecil Westerhof]

I made Saturday some videos of a contest, but they are a ‘little’ to
big to be published. For example a video of not seven minutes is
1.2 GB.

I first worked with statements like (the audio needed to be increased also):
    ffmpeg -y -i ${file}.MP4 -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 -af volume=3 ${file}AudioInc.MP4

This brought back the size back to 377 MB, but took almost 2 hours to
process.

So I tried:
    ffmpeg -y -i ${file}.MP4 -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 -af volume=3 -preset ultrafast ${file}AudioInc.MP4

That only took ten minutes, but increased the size to 956 MB.

Is there a way to decrease the size significantly, that does not take
to much time and still keeps a good quality? (By accident I went from
-crf 18 to -crf 120 instead of -crf 20. That was a very small file,
but very blocky.) They would like me to bring the size back to about
150 MB.

Info from the input file:
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'MVI_0980.MP4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : mp42
    minor_version   : 1
    compatible_brands: mp42avc1CAEP
    copyright       : 
    copyright-eng   : 
    creation_time   : 2017-04-01 15:11:55
  Duration: 00:06:54.95, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 24054 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1920x1080, 23919 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 30k tbn, 60k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2017-04-01 15:11:55
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 127 kb/s (default)

-- 
Cecil Westerhof
Senior Software Engineer
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilwesterhof