yeah i just want to keep it on the computer possibly put it on a web page

If it is going on a web page, I would go for Windows Media or Real like Paul suggested. If the video is particularly dear to you, render a copy out to DV Avi as well so you can keep one at high quality - 700MB should fit on a 80min CD, barely, to back it up off the hard drive. That may be what you have already done though since 3 minutes in DV format would equal 810MB, about your file size. If you rendered it to Windows Media 9, at 500kbps 2-pass VBR(which is pretty good quality, too high for streaming) it will be around 12MB for 3 minutes, pretty small. I am not sure if you can do 2-pass VBR directly from Vegas. I usually use the free Windows Media Encoder off Microsofts page.

You could also go to MPEG2, DVD quality, and the file size would be around 1/4th of DV size but this isn't the best format if you are going to edit the video again later. If you just want the copy saved, and don't intend to edit it, this should work well. It should also easily fit on a CD. I speak of CD's because I haven't picked up a DVD burner yet.

Brought up a good point re; archival. If you think you might want to edit the video, or include it in a future project, might consider a copy rendered to DV (if that's what it started as), or else one of the mjpeg codecs. Something that would work and be smaller would be mpg2 using the custom settings to make it all I frames. At any rate, 700 meg will fit on a CD.

For web use generally as above you want real or winmedia, though DiVX & Xvid do work well (just that your viewers might have to download/install the codecs to play it).

There are a ton of things you can do to make one of these highly compressed files smaller & look better - you'll have to do some test renders though as it's highly individual based on your source video and the subject matter. Shouldn't have to worry too much though, as 3 minutes in RealVideo9 with a 1.3 meg bitrate should come in well under your 200 meg target, and any more bitrate then that and slower machines will have trouble playing it. For web video should be able to get it down to a few meg or less using 256 or 100K, though there will be a quality hit. Usually either real or winmedia will look better for a particular clip, & two pass vbr will generally look better, though you have to be careful to set the Hi-Lo range of bitrates.

mike