I recently started using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 v3.0.
The main problem I am struggling with, is that I can' figure out how to compress the video into a decent format. They're either too large, or too small, or just really poor quality.
I need help soon, as I need this out by the 30th Any tips would be nice.
Yes I've googled this but have yet to find the answear after about 2 hours of searching.
Premiere is pretty crap for compression, I wouldn't recommend using it for that purpose.
The easiest way you can get fairly good compression if you are using windows, is export the video from premiere as DV uncompressed, then import into windows movie maker and export it as 'best quality 3000kbits' or whatever it's called, should compress down to 1/10 the size and still look good at the same resolution.
The harder way is download a copy (torrent works) of TMPGEnc, and chose your codec and quality of choice, it does everything, avi, mpeg2, mpeg4, wmv, divx. Might take you a few tries to get a compression / quality ratio you like, I recommend keeping the framerate and resolution the same, just play with the kbits to change the size.
I use mpeg2 2pass VBR, interleaved, high motion tracking and 3000 kbits avg, 5000 max. This has the least encoding errors, can still be imported back into premiere and edited, and the quality loss is barley noticeable. File size goes down to about 15%.
TMPGEnc is not free software (unless you pirate it, which i'm not condoning by telling you to download it via torrent).