I'm creating a ten minute clip in Adobe Premiere Pro. The first time I exported and left it at the defaults, I got a 6 gig file. So, this time, I'm looking to add in a ton of compression because with the quality I'm looking for, this shouldn't be more than 50-100mb. So I was wondering what format I should choose for the movie file? What type of video compression/audio compression I should use.

DivX/Xvid (or most MPEG-4 varients) offer more or less what you are looking for. Good compression, good quality. To encode with Divx in premiere pro you need only to install the Divx codec ( www.divx.com - the free one will be perfectly fine) - it should then show up as an option under one of the exporters (been a wile since I've used premiere pro, sorry)

However, the new AVC h.264 codec promises even better quality with even lower file sizes, although it is relatively new, and it may be hard to get an encoder for the format ( wikipedia entry on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264 )

For some reason divx wasn't showing up as a choice in premiere pro after I installed it (probably needed to restart or something). I did find a solutions of sorts. It seems that I needed to limit the bit rate of the video. By limiting it down to 300kb/s I was able to get the .avi down to 175mb. Not perfect, but after I run it through divX it should be great.

Just an FYI, encoding it in DivX at 300kb/s will produce an identically sized file... (and of course, the quality will be lessened if you put the video through two lossy compressions) - but 300kb/sec is pretty low. That video must look like crap

Anyway, to save it in DivX in Premiere Pro go to the export->movie (not the adobe media exporter), for "File Type" pick "Microsoft AVI", then go to Video, and for "Compressor" you should be able to pick DivX

Oh, and how long is this video?

RTFP I can't imagine this should be more than 75-100MB with some lossy compression...

heh, oops, I was looking for a number (as in 10, not ten) when I re-read it.

Anywho, 300kb/sec (for the combined audio and video) will produce a file size of 175mb every time, regardless of codec. To get it down to 50mb, it has to have a bitrate of ~85kb/sec (combined audio/video)

Just remember, (length in seconds) * (bitrate in kb/s) == (size in kb)

Oh, stupid me. I was looking under filetypes for a divX type instead of for video compression.

So size is completely determined by bitrate? Then what the hell is the point of compression?

quality, mainly. How well are those 300kb/s being used? Thats the issue. DivX will have better compression than, say, MPEG-2, and therefore a 300kb/s DivX video will look better than a 300kb/s MPEG-2 file - even though the file sizes are identical

However, a better option is to use two-pass encoding with variable bitrate, so that the bitrate can be lowered or increased depending on what is occuring during that frame in the movie, much like how a VBR MP3 will take less space with higher quality than a CBR (constant) MP3 will if the song has a mix of slow and fast parts (for example, the intro to Iron Man really doesn't need all of the 128kb/s that so many MP3's are encoded at, as it is a single drum beat in a narrow frequency range)