Techniques for compressing a slideshow presentation video? I often do QuickTime screen recordings of slideshow presentations (e.g. Keynote).

These videos are 1080p 60fps and mostly text. They can go for minutes at a time with the same exact frame on-screen (static slide) yet have 60fps transitions between slides.

What are some compression tools or techniques that work best for this kind of video? I’m looking for something that keeps the text sharp while maintaining the 60fps animation transitions, without the file size being insane.

I’m not looking for answers like “use the Export for 1080p menu in QuickTime”. The best answer will have a solution that’s customized for the specific needs of a slideshow presentation video, perhaps using variable frame rate compression techniques.
x264 is the best-in-class encoder for generating H.264 video streams and you can use it via ffmpeg, a command-line tool, to encode to a small-sized file. Get a binary from here - opt for the latest nightly/snapshot release - and run

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -crf 23 output.mov


The output will be the same constant frame rate as the input but x264 is very good at minimizing space consumed by frames which are the same as preceding ones. Lower CRF values produce better quality files at the cost of larger file sizes. 18 to 28 is a decent range to stick within.