I just purchased a Canon HV20 last week and as I don't have FCP yet my only choice is iMovie. The footage looks fantastic! I downloaded the clip from the Canon website (the girl at the bar) to get an idea of how to compress it when exporting to the web from iMovie. They used h.264 and 1920X1080 so I tried that. It came out beautiful. I checked the file size and it was a whopping 1 GIG! I used 12 frames per second, automatic bitrate, 24 key frame rate (I have no idea what that is but will google), and multipass encoding. Their footage came in at 182 mb on my hard drive. How are people getting all this great quality footage online and keeping the size down and the quality up? I resized it down to 480X270 and it's down to 82mb. Footage looks good but not the size I see with other people's clips. Do professional applications like FCP compress better? c
Mark
Mark