Exporting a little movie file that won't consume my entire hard disk space

[Danny Pro]

I shot some movie clips at the garden show with one of those little Fujifilm point and shoot digital cameras that feature a movie mode. Rather than bore my friends who couldn't make it to the show with a bunch of unedited footage, I decided to do what I normally would with my DV camcorder and import these clips into Premiere Pro CS3, trim them, sort them, and make an output movie that's about 7 minutes long. I then expected to copy this final movie file into a USB drive and take it to work where I could share it over lunch. Unfortunately, based on the settings I used, I wound up with a beautiful movie file that was 15 GB in size and so unable to transport easily. The total size of all twenty clips in the source folder added up to only 734MB. The only editing was trimming and about twenty short dissolves. No matter which combination of settings I've tried so far, I either get smaller files (about 1GB, which is similar to the original) that look like crap or HUGE files that do look like the original. I just have to believe that there is an intermediate setting/quality. I just haven't found it yet.

The camera produces Motion JPEG 640x480 1.0 square pixel 30fps .AVI video files with 11kHZ 8bit audio and it plays fine on the timeline. I did use the default DV NTSC settings for the project into which I dropped the AVI clips. So that may have been my first mistake.

Let's say I have two 100MB clips that I drop into the timeline back to back with no further editing. What project settings and output settings do I need to use in order to make a movie file that is about 200MB with minimal (imperceptible in casual viewing) quality loss. Thanks.

[Baldrick]

Try use h264/avc or divx/xvid as video codec for good quality at lower file sizes. Adjust the video bitrate/quality setting to get smaller output file size.

[Supreme2k]

I have Premiere Elements, but it's mostly the same with settings.

With those, you can use the Standard 48KHz setting (720 x 480), which is suggested for standard definition camcorders and cameras. You can then export to mp4 (h264) at 700-1000k, which will give your target size (probably quite a bit smaller).

[Danny Pro]

Thanks for the replies. While going the H264 route may get around my problem, it doesn't address the fundamental question which is - can one splice two motion jpeg clips together of say 100MB each and get a very similar quality motion jpeg output file of 200MB in size. What CODEC settings will retain the original quality and size of the source files?

[Supreme2k]

If they are the from the same camera at the same setting, you can use AVIDemux to join them without re-encoding (no quality loss). Just load up the file and choose File->Append.

[Danny Pro]

Thanks for the link. I'll it a go. It's too bad Premiere can't do it. I'm pretty sure about that since it does not include ALL the same project settings to match this particular video source. Which then results in having to recode the output.