Flash and Windows Media are your best options for small file size/good quality that will play most anywhere. You can't export Flash straight from Vegas;you need a tool like SwishFlix, or other converter. To output a Windows Media file, File/Render As/Windows media Video.
[edit/ never mind, Kelly gave you better advice]

What I currently do is edit the footage as 720x480p in Vegas. I render uncompressed and use the Flash 8 Video encoder to encode and resize the videos. Works very well. I usually resize the videos at 540x360. You can see the results here

Thanks, I'll try these suggestions out. It's nice to know there's knowledgeable pros out there in this forum.

Ditto what everyone else said, and add QuickTime as another good web delivery format with WMV and Flash.

Also, on the size of resolution question I have some advice. Know your audience! Ever since I got my 24" dell monitor running at 1920 x 1200, I am bugged by really small videos. So if you do a standard "animation" size 320x240, it will be hard for people with high resolution monitors to see very well.

As monitors and broadband are improving, the resolution/quality of web content (video & images) has been lagging behind. It really bugs me because a lot of web content is delivered at low-res formats. So consider what type of audience will be viewing your content when you select your output resolution. High-end graphics fluent folks will require a higher end delivery format.

Higher resolutions require higher bitrates, and correspondingly huger files. The original question was how to make the file small. 640x480 video doesn't look good until you get up over 1Mbps, and that ends up being 40MB/minute instead of 10MB/minute.

I suppose when we all have 24" monitors, 500GB drives, and 22Mbps broadband connections then we'll all be sending HD clips back and forth. Until then, small web videos will be the norm.

I suppose when we all have 24" monitors, 500GB drives, and 22Mbps broadband connections then we'll all be sending HD clips back and forth.

Those days may not be so far away.

Good 21" LCD monitors are available for less than $500 today, and I suspect that's where the $799 price of a 24" will be soon also.

1000GB external "drives" are in a race for the bottom currently, they cost about the same as the LCD and are available at the corner store (Staples, etc.).

Regular apartment buildings in small towns in Sweden are now installing 100 Mbps broadband for tenant use. This is not seen as deluxe, just what's reasonable, and the monthly rates of $40-50 (for top speed) reflect this.

In more olden buildings, 21 Mbps is offered for about $35/month in the capital.

Of course, this is in a country that only a few years ago had as much internet capacity to the U.S. as the rest of Europe together.

It still bugs me that we are still living in the third world here in the U.S.

The first world is Scandinavia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.

The second world is much of the rest of Europe and much of the rest of Asia.

The third world is where the monopoly phone company is "competing" with the monopoly cable company to see who can move the slowest to offer decent speeds, who can offer the worst customer service, and who can put in protection fees, er, gateway fees, the quickest.

The latter is led by companies such as Verizon that now has amassed a monopoly that covers 80% of local phone lines (and therefore control of DSL access) in the U.S.

Verizon's CEO has been lobbying heavily for laws to let them charge fees for providing customers access to Vonage and other competitors, and extra money for downloads "to ensure the quality" (this used to be called "protection" and led to modern racketeering laws).

They are throwing large money bags at key politicians, who are generally happy to provide "play for pay" after receiving those bags, in a political environment that hasn't been so thoroughly corrupt since the 1970s.

(Although it could be argued that [the Democrats] weren't far behind in the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

Verizon's CEO even said, "Why should Yahoo and Google be allowed to use our network for free? We paid for this network, they should pay us for access!"

Of course he is forgetting that we end customers are already paying for that network, with some of the world's highest montly fees.

Verizon is feeling so secure that they are now raising their long distance rates by 33%, this after most of their competitors have been gobbled up by Ma Bell, or perhaps we should call it Pa Bell this time now that the divestiture has been nearly 100% undone.

Grrrrr.

Perhaps Google will come to the rescue with nationwide fiber and local Wi-Fi.

We could certainly use the competition.

Hey Coursedesign;

You've basically just described the essence of capitalism ;-)

The good thing about capitalism is it grants great freedoms for entrepreneurs and businesses to grow and gain more wealth.

The BAD thing about capitalism is it grants great freedoms for entrepreneurs and businesses to grow and gain more wealth.

It's a double-edged sword.

BTW - what has been suggested for making smaller video files in Vegas 6, will it also work in Vegas 5 (version I have)?

Yes, all this stuff works the same in Vegas 5, Vegas 4, Vegas 3, etc. The only caveat is that older versions of Vegas will probably have older versions of the various encoders too, so the result might not be quite as good as the newer versions will produce. It should still be usable though. An exception is QuickTime which always uses an external converter, so even older versions of Vegas will use the newest QuickTime encoder you have installed.

You could also look into Microsoft's own Windows Media Encoder. Some folks mention that this produces better results than rendering to WMV in Vegas. To use it, you would render to AVI in Vegas and then process this file in Microsoft's stand-alone Encoder.

I've been rendering my HD videos at 800x452 and posting them online for a while now. They begin to stream in just a few seconds of buffering on a normal cable connection. Longer videos get posted at 640x480 letterboxed.

When parents with dial-up complain about the download times I report them to social services for depriving their kids of their god given right to broadband, deathmatch and peer to peer file sharing.

What I was trying to do was send a video file to a friend. I recorded a 8 min, 40 sec video at The NY Auto Show of the Dodge Challenger Concept car. A friend of mine wanted to see it, so I transferred it to my computer and wanted to reduce it's size.

There has to be a way of reducing the video size. I have a copy of Jeff Lew's "Killer Bean 2" in MPEG -1, which is longer than my video AND is 16:1 with almost crystal clear stereo audio, and he got the video size down to a little over 20 megs. The smallest I got my video was 115 megs to equal the same quality as Lew's Killer Bean video.

Do I adjust the rendering, or the project size then render? I had tried adjusting the video render down such as reducing the Kbs and audio, and got back an error message instead. :(

render out to .mov at 720x480 animation. Then convert with flixpro or another flash program at: 512.....360x240. Your flash file (for :30 seconds) should be around 1.3 mgs.

Here is an example of a .mov file that was 100mg converted to 1.2mgs as a flash file:

http://www.conleyradio.com/tvspot_themill_directedfrombannerad.asp

Just for the census I render to QTime Movie and then use the Flash Encoder. from withing the encoder or Flash itself you can set the screen size and the skin and play options. Very quick to do, easy and nice results.

However be aware of current incompatibility between IE6/7 and Flash due to the Eoise things and the need to use javascript to avoid using the embed tag if your going out to HTML. With WMP10 around in beta you might consider wmv too as it might be more universal in the near future.

One point that no one's mentioned.
The quality of the video prior to encoding can have a huge impact on how well it can be compressed. This I know seems almost absurd, after all you're trying to create a small, rather low quality image.
However the thing that can really gobble up bandwidth is shaky video and noise, that's why trailers of movies shot on 35mm can look pretty good streamed at very low bitrates, the encoder isn't wasting bandwidth trying to encode crud and most likely the camera was locked down during the original shoot, it's also why VCD is still quite popular in much of Asia where they watch a lot of animation.

So you might be able to do better by firstly using the uSoft WMV encoder, it's free from uSoft or it least it was when I downloaded it. Set the keyframe interval quite long, this can save a lot of bandwidth.
There's also many more tweaks than you get in Vegas to optimise the encoding.

Now I haven't seen your source video but I'm guessing it was shot hand held on a consummer camera in what's actually pretty low light for such a camera. Probably looks OK in Vegas but I'll bet if you look closely you'll see plenty of noise and the camera work is well, kinda got the shakes. Not too easy to loose the shakes but the noise you can work on, try Mike Crash's noise reduction tool or even simpler, add some Gaussian Blur in Vegas, it'll make the image softer but if you're downscaling anyway not to worry. But in the process it'll average out the noise.
Bob.

Just to reinforce what Bob is saying, if I've got this correct, I use the free TEMPGEnc VCD creation tool. I get work smashed down to small MPEG1 sizes and use the BEST formatting parameters. I tell you what? The results, played back on a TV - I'm truly hard pressed to see the difference. Really!

The noise thing IS a reality. I use a Miller Tripod - thanks Bob! - and kill as much "wobble" as a possible, this IS a mainstay of my work.

Try TEMPGEnc VCD templates and experiment and create your own. It is free after all!

Grazie

400 x 300 1 MBPS flash video is about 7-8 MB per one minute, looks good and starts playing almost instantly over a decent broadband connection. No reason for lower quality or smaller size.

To comment on CourseDesign politics:

As globalization consolidates the economic base into a few multinationals who in turn buy up the media and the political infrastructure the qualities that made America great such as free-market competition and democracy loose much of their meaning. The weird thing is that after so much consolidation and the open fraud of the current administration supported by the meant to be independent supreme court most Americans are still under the delusion that democracy and free market competition exist here.

Are you all aware the the telecommunication giants have funded legislation to prohibit internet hotspots in most large American towns whereas in my old European country almost everywhere is live and nearly all broadband. The irony is that what Americans have long been taught is a socialistic near communist Europe with hungry children is now the real thriving capitalist center of the world while we here in America are becoming a technological stagnant one-party state.

Oh God, now I'm on the NSA watch list!

Interesting. There's a company not more than 2 blocks from me right now that is delivering 22Mbps wireless residental and 45Mbps wireless commercial internet access over a 5 mile radius. They're currently setting up at least 10 more locations around the area. They're providing hotspots in most downtown areas. They're working on a contract to cover most of New England by 2008. They're also priced far less than cable or DSL.

And yes, their legal department keeps on top of all laws and regulations as they go. In most cases it's the municipalities themselves that are contracting them.

Chien: What you say is true, unfortunately if you analyse the whole country you will find the towns doing this are small where the lobbying has not seemed worth it. The situation in large metropolitan areas with a big markets is not the same. Check out the hot-spot coverage in NY or LA. Most cities under payment from the big TC companies are limiting hot-spots to minute areas such as 2-5 mile radius, some even much less.