what kinds of things do you mean....what i want to do?....i'm really new to compression.....
can you give me a few tips

What is your goal for these clips? If you want to go back to MiniDV tape, you need to render to DV-AVI (NTSC DV or PAL DV). If you want to go to DVD, render to MPEG2. If you want a clip for the web, you might try WMV. So, what do you want to do with these clips???

ok....all i want for now is a video that can fit on a cd for watching on the pc....say with windows media player....the only important thing is that it fit on a cd...

Use MPEG 1 (VCD NTSC)

so then i can only play it on a dvd player? is that right?
i think i might wanna still play it on PC though

Can be played on both as long as DVD player can play VCD.

A MPEG-1 file will play off a computer's CD drive. Are you going to share the CD with others? If so, then then MPEG-1 is probably still a good choice. If only you are going to make use of the CD, and you're going to use the CD as storage, then any file type would work limited to the size of the CD which of course is rather small compared to a DVD. The WMV and RM file types give good compression and stil deliver good quality. Much more so at higher bitrates which you can select from the template. Generally the default setting for both WMV and RM is too low since it is geared towards minimum speed for playback off the web.

Hope I'm not confussing you. To make a CD other than a VCD (using the CD only as a storage medium making a data CD) its just like playing a file off a hard drive. Windows will load the file. The codec you used to compress it will be called to decompress it. This of course assumes you play the CD off the same PC you used to create it.

If you want to play off a CD onto a PC, then any of the recent streaming type codecs will work, winmedia, realmedia, DiVX, and so on. For a look at which does what, check out http://www.doom9.org/codecs-103-1.htm though the best alternative is to do a test render in anything you're considering and see how it looks. With any of these formats you can use a CD autolaunch prog... Using MMB or similar you can also approximate a DVD by adding chapter points (called file markers) to a winmedia file.

[In the future you may be able to play back mpg4, DiVX, winmedia9 on a DVD player - some have DiVX/mpg4 capability allready]

Mpg1/2 will do OK, but if you really compress the video (to get 1 - 1.5 hour on a CD), you'll find they don't hold up compared to these others. As you're doing only 20 minutes, shouldn't be as much an issue. Go to vcdhelp for info on how to do it so it might play back on a DVD player using mpg1/2. Some DVD players will play any mpg1 or 2 stuck on a CD -> check out dvdrhelp.com .

When/while checking out different compression formats, it's important to remember that the CPU has to decode this stuff, so going to too high a bitrate with Realmedia, winmedia etc. can cause things to really slow down when you're trying to play off a CD.

A final note, with VV4c and wmv9, you can do 5.1 audio pretty well.

option 1: say i wanted to do a vcd of this 20 min flic...can i render right into vcd or do i have to render and then compress to vcd with a different program....if different then what should i render it to to firstly.

option 2: ok ..say i decided to use xvid and only play it on the pc.....for a twenty minute video....what approximate bitrate should i use and what should i set the encoding mode to....1 pass...2 pass and then the subcategories therein.....thanks