I currently have a Sony HDR-Sr11 and have videos I want to convert. The thing is, I am hoping there is a way to convert these HD videos so that they look really clear yet have a filesize that is not ridiculous.

The videos are about 30 to 40 minutes long and shot in full HD.

I am on a MAC and using iMovie 08'.

Can anyone offer some way to do this to get the clear picture and (low as possible) file size.

I need the file size to be low as possible so that people can download these movies but don't want to get crappy quality.

Thanks.

If the videos are going to be for web download then converting them to the Flash HD format would work great. You can see some example of the final output on Vimeo.com (there are hundreds examples of users work from here on Vimeo also).

Other than that, dependent on the final resolution you're going for, you could do MP4 (like Quicktime) or even WMV.

Troy

I currently have a Sony HDR-Sr11 and have videos I want to convert. The thing is, I am hoping there is a way to convert these HD videos so that they look really clear yet have a filesize that is not ridiculous.

The videos are about 30 to 40 minutes long and shot in full HD.

I am on a MAC and using iMovie 08'.

Can anyone offer some way to do this to get the clear picture and (low as possible) file size.

I need the file size to be low as possible so that people can download these movies but don't want to get crappy quality.

Thanks.

Best way to achieve good quality with small file sizes is VBR multi-pass. Not an expert on iMovie capabilities but MP4/MOV allows typically up to 4-pass encoding which will give good results with low bit rates.

Make sure that the max bit rate is larger than the average bit rate. It will take much longer to render though but worth the effort typically.