How Do I Convert High Quality MPG to a Web Friendly Size and Format?

stizz

gorilla beta tester
I have an awesome Sony camera that saves video as .MPG's

I want to put some of these movies up on the web so that my family can see them. However, not everybody has broadband, and they all use PC's. (I know, I'm trying to convert them to Mac, but I digress).

The first clip I want to convert is a minute long and is 18 mb. What would be the easiest program for me to use to make it more dialup web friendly?
Ideally I'd like to see this file compressed down to about 3-5 mb's, and in a format that my computer illiterate family wont have too much trouble opening.

HELP!
 
I have a sony handycam camera, I dump all my movies from the MiniDV camera strait into iMovie. Then after editing, I simply goto File>Export>Web then it compresses it down to web sizes and makes it a quicktime video. If you have no way of hooking your cam upto the computer via USB or Firewire (mine is FW), then you can prolly just import the mpeg movie into iMovie, then Export it as mentioned above. Happy video editing!
 
Sorenson Squeeze might help you get the most out of your file size once you do what Jamesrdorn described.
 
Is it a digital camera that just _also_ does video and saves as MPEG-1? Or a DV camera that exports MPEG-2 somehow? Either way, you could use QuickTime Pro. I'd go MPEG-4. And make those people download QuickTime for Windows if they haven't already... :)
 
It is a Sony F717, basically a still cam that also does mpg onto the smartcard. I was able to use both the above mentioned applications, QTpro & iMovie,..but I did something wrong both times. I got the video compressed nicely into .mov that was about 4 megs, but I lost the audio track (its mono and embedded somehow in the original mpg), so Ive made progress, but still not all the way home yet. Thanks for all the help thus far.
 
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