When I try to render a video in 24p HD, the file size is enormously big. More than my harddrive can even take. Is there a way to compress the file size while retaining the same quality? Any help would be appreciated! Thank you!
"That seems unusually high or is that actually normal? "
If you are rendering to AVI Uncompressed (which you are), that file size is normal.
However, rendering to AVI Uncompressed is not normal, because it is not a delivery format, and it is not playable.
So, if your goal is to play back your video when it is done, you would render to a compressed format, MPEG-2, MP4, and WMV being but a few examples.
They're probably more than fast enough. Rendering almost never writes the output file at even a fraction of the speed that the drive is capable of handling.