Is anyone aware of software that will shrink the size of a Quicktime movie? My digital camera only gives me two sizes to choose from…640x480 and 320x240. Even at 15 fps, a 30-second movie at 320x240 is almost 7 meg in size. I’m wondering if a movie file can be shrunk or compressed after it’s created?

I have a strong personal bias towards Sorenson Squeeze - http://www.s-vision.com/ I’ve edited around 1000 hours of web video and this has done me very well. You can input just about any video format and output to wmv, avi, qt, mov, fla, flv, etc.

With Quicktime 7, Apple released/made available the H.264 codec, which is very good for compression while keeping quality (size is roughly half of what it otherwise would be).  However, to view movies encoded with it you need Quicktime 7, which is still fairly new and obviously not too widespread (I think there’s only a beta available for Windows).

If you’re interested in giving that a try, though (and you’re on OS X), then a new version of FFMPEGX (0.0.9T) was released this week that supports H.264 encoding.  (Don’t let that low verion number fool you; the program is rather mature.)  I think you should be able to use that to convert your existing movie to an .avi encoded with H.264.

And if you are also on OS X and still have iMovie installed, I would suggest trying that.  I was able to make a 3 minute movie from my camera down to about 12 megs.

I’m not on a Mac. Maybe I should consider it, eh?