Video compression help

Hi. I am making a tutorial for a game I made. I used FRAPS to record and Adobe Premiere to edit and export. The problem is my 9 minute movie is some 2 GB! What is the best way to reduce the movie's size? Should I compress all the FRAPS captures before editing them in Premiere? Also, it needs to a QuickTime file so I can play it in world. What codec should I use when exporting? I've been using MPEG4 but again the files are too big. I am new to all this so any other advice like ideal pixel aspect ration tips would be great!

Thanks,
Epilort Byrne

I've got the same setup. Render your completed video out as an uncompressed AVI. The resulting file will be BIG.

Open that AVI in Quicktime and export it as a h.264 MP4.

This will give you the best size/quality/compatibility ratio.

I have a registered version of Quicktime, so Im not sure if you have the export options in the regular version. If not, its well worth the $20 to do it.

I agree with using H.264. Most of the time for the web people drop the resolution to 1/2 size - 320x240 for NTSC. Mine are crisp and clear and around 1.5MB per min. Not sure how that looks if you want to stream it in SL.

To export you do need quicktime pro, which is well worth it.

So I should buy QuickTime Pro instead of exporting directly from Premiere using H.264? Any particular reason for this?

That is a good question. My early attempts to export directly from Premiere via quicktime didnt work out so well, so I found the method I use to work well.

Maybe you want to try both? See what works better and report back. I'm always looking for better ways to do this too.

Over zealous use of codex to compress a movie stream, may look good at first when you compare movie size and data rates, but bear in mind, like a zip compression alogrithium, at some point this has to be uncompressed on the fly by the viewers system, the result can be more CPU, ram and rendering required. Using mp4 and h.264 is great solutions, providing the viewers have kept their version of QT upto date.
A way to express this perhaps better, is to view a movie ingame, and press Ctrl+Shift+2 and look at the UpDateImage %. Using too much compression requires greater effort of the rendering pipelines of the client (average 100kbps data rate = 40+% UpDateImage using mp4/h.264 codex), using a less compressive codex, gives potentially equal, and sometimes better quality and reduces the UpDateImage to 20-30%. Its a trade off.
Get the balance right, and you can have quite large (resolution) movies, that are clear and crisp, providing your delivery server can supply the data stream at the correct rate for the amount of users and you have enough bandwidth to both run the game and still stream the movie data rate.

Another issue we found with using high compression codex, is the client stalling, while the first portion of the movie floods to the system and the codex begins to steal the system resources to begin work.