The night the files didn't arrive
A two-minute clip, a 4.2 GB file, a four-hour upload bar and washed-out colours the next morning. How one bad night of uploading turned into Becheloon.
It was a little after midnight. I had a few clips from that afternoon on my phone, my editor was waiting for them, and all I had to do was send them.
The first file was 4.2 GB. Two minutes of footage.
The upload bar moved like it was thinking about it. Time remaining: 3 hours 58 minutes. Then 4 hours 12 minutes. I went to bed and left the laptop open.
The morning after
The files arrived. My editor’s first message wasn’t “thanks”. It was:
Why are the colours so washed out? And the sound is really quiet.
On my phone the clips looked great. On his screen, and later on Instagram, they looked grey and flat, like someone had turned the contrast down and the brightness up.
Nothing was broken. The phone had done exactly what I asked: it recorded in a high-quality, high-dynamic-range format built for editing. The problem was that everything after the phone (the upload, the platform, the other person’s player) didn’t read the file the way the phone wrote it.
So I opened the file up
I started reading the file instead of looking at it. Codec, colour transfer, bit depth, frame rate, loudness. Every one of those numbers told part of the story:
- The codec was an editing codec. Wonderful to cut, but many times heavier than what a platform will ever show.
- The colour was HDR. Some players read it correctly; many don’t, and that is where “washed out” comes from.
- The audio sat far below the loudness platforms normalise to, so it played quieter than everything around it.
None of this was visible from the thumbnail. All of it was in the file.
The fix was boring. That was the point.
I wrote down what each destination actually wants, converted the files the way the destination expects them and, the part I care about most, measured the result with VMAF, the open quality metric Netflix built, so I’d know the smaller file still looked like the original.
The same 4.2 GB became a fraction of the size, uploaded in minutes, and looked the way it did on my phone.
Doing that by hand every time was the annoying part. So I built a tool that does it for me: it reads the file, tells you in plain words what will go wrong and why, and only then makes the upload-ready version, with the quality score printed next to it.
I called it Becheloon, Persian slang for “squeeze it.” Squeeze the file, keep the shot.
What it will never do
- It never uploads your video anywhere. Everything runs on your own computer.
- It never re-encodes a file that is already right. First, do no harm.
- It never hands you a file that scored below its quality threshold.
If you’ve ever looked at your own upload and thought that’s not what I shot, this is for you. The report is free, and so are your first three videos: download Becheloon and run it on the clip that bothered you.