I'm a bit new to using Premiere, so sorry if this is vague.

I am looking to compress a 720 x 576 / 5 1/2 minute video down into 4 different versions (2 x MPEG1 format - 1 @ high quality & 1 @ low quality / 2 x A.N.Other decent web video format - 1 @ high quality & 1 @ low quality).

The trouble is, we have been requested to keep the file size down to below 50mb per file, preferably below 20mb!! Any encoding attempts here in Adobe Media Encoder are so far failing to get below 50mb (tried WMV, MOV, FLV etc.).

So a couple of questions really...

a.) Are the file size expectations realistic?
b.) Is it best to create a high quality large file and then encode that rather than directly from Adobe Premiere source file?
c.) What are the best settings in Premiere to encode at high quality but low file size?

I fear that question c.) might be like asking the meaning of life, but hopefully you might have some answers that can push me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance,

Mark Carter
Technician | Transportation Planning & Visualisation
Parsons Brinckerhoff | Cardiff Office - UK

H.264 codec compression is the latest and greatest standard although it's been around for several years now - http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/

For me, I output uncompressed from Premiere, then use Quicktime 7 to compress to a .mov file using H.264. It makes the smallest files while retaining quality better than any other codec I have ever seen The trade off is that it uses more calculations to achieve this compression than most other codecs, so it may not play back so well on really old computers.

I also really like the file size to quality ratio for Flash (flv) files. Put this in a web page and you also get streaming. This is my favourite way of showing content like for demo reel and animations on my website (www.dylanswan.id.au) because users don't need to download a separate file and worry about codecs - it just plays direct in their web browser - the absolute easiest way for the user

(Your post was about a month ago, so sorry about the late reply because I just saw it. I noticed no one else had replied so I thought I would at least write something even though it's probably too late by now, but I hope this helps for the future anyway  )

Dylan Swan
Visualisation Consultant
PB, Brisbane, Australia

http://dylanswan.id.au