I captured a 3-minute movie using Pinnacle Studio 9. It`s in DV format and about 400 MB in size. I tried to compress it with several available codecs but only managed to squeeze it down to some 200 MB, plus the video quality is poor. I think a well compressed video of this length should be way under 10 MB but I don`t know what to do...I would appreciate if someone told me what codecs are generally used. It crossed my mind that maybe I shouldn`t capture in DV format which seems to be the largest in size but if I choose some other way the picture is blurred, even in DV it doesn`t look 'perfect' to me. I recorded the video with Sony DCR-TRV140E video camera.
i don't know how pinnacle handles xvid or any other mpeg4 video. but i usually use virtualdub and xvid, you need to get the codec first. the latest is xvid 1.1 beta1 though its beta, it pretty stable, at least to me. even on default settings you should be able to compress it at a great quality.