In all my time of using CS3 I have never really been able to master rendering a high quality video with a somewhat small file size.

Here is an example:
I have helmet cam footage of me out at the track. The file is 19 minutes long and is 657mb. I dropped in Premiere and cut it to 7 minutes and added a tittle. The video with 100% quality came out to 5.5 gigs. I was able to get the decent quality one down to 1.5 gigs.

Being that my video is half the size of the original wouldn't it be a smaller file size?

Does any one have any suggestions on some good rendering option for basic videos that would be used for web?

Thanks,
Brian

Use another tool, use another export option or different format and start learning about video formats/NLE in general and then in the next phase about PR

I started reading up about the different export option through premiere. I have tried several options for my videos but I have a question about h.264.

Premiere already comes with h.264 is that same as the Quick time Pro that you would purchase? Or would it be recommended to still purchase the Quick Time pro and get the H.264?

thanks

No need to purchase anything, get the free Mpeg Streamclip for h.264 export, there is hardly anything better than it, not even expensive software. Some of the best things in life are, indeed, free.

Or go for the alternative x.264 option and Handbrake - also free. Yeah... some of the best things in life... etc...

I've found that the F4V (Flash h.264) works great at around 1.5-2mbps per second for Anamorphic DV resolution. I can't remember if CS3 had the queuing support in the Media Encoder like CS4 does, but what I tended to do when going for a filesize/quality comparison was just duplicate the job 4 or 5 times with different settings, go do something else for a while and then come back to see which one worked out the best.

I dont believe CS3 has F4V. But what I was able to do was bump up the bitrate to about 1.5 mbps and that helped out tremendously. But I still am going to look into those external compressors for when I start working with larger files.

Thanks for all the feed back!