Reducing file size of movie clip - need to upload for High School Musical competition!

[SugarSkyHigh]

i have spent half the afternoon filming my DD and 2 of her cronies prancing around for the 'my school musical' competition.... recorded it using my digital camera (not a camcorder) and downloaded as usual to my pc. However, the clip although 2 mins long is about 100 megabites, and the Disney website won't let us upload it into the competition as it is too big!

Does anyone know how I can reduce the file size of this movie clip??? please help - the competition closing date is soon and they are desperate to have their amazing performance viewable on the disney site!

What will Disney accept?

You could try Zipping it, with something like 7 zip.

You could try converting to DivX

You could try using Real Producer to encode it as a RealVideo file... think Real Producer Basic will do this, though not sure.

Could convert to Flash (flv) format, using RivaVX - Try the Free encoder.

Handy article about converting video to FLV, with tips for scaling video size, keyframe rates, video and sound bitrate.

nannynick, you are a sweetheart thank you so much... i have actually managed it myself! For future ref. if anyone's interested, i downloaded windows movie maker (for free) and used that to very easily reduce the size of the file.

have now uploaded to Disney, only to be told they are sorry but they cannot show ALL clips uploaded!!

thanks again x

Good to hear you managed to convert your video file. I've just been playing with RivaVX, it's great... very easy to use, handy if you ever want to convert something to Flash Video format.

nannynick, can you tell me what Flash is though? I've heard of it obviously but what's the difference between that and other video formats? Is it a good one to use for emailing video clips?

Going into the history of Flash would take a long time... so best to summarise as it is now one of the most popular web technologies for displaying moving images and interactivity.
Flash video is common place now, used by sites such as YouTube, BBC. It can be good for web based video, as the file size can be kept small, and the file can be streamed from most web servers. Size and Quality are compromised, so Flash wouldn't be used for when the file would need to be re-edited, or for broadcast.
Can be very handy for e-mailing video clips, as file size can be quite small and a lot of systems, not just Windows based, can playback the file.