reducing large movie files

[Geoff_N]

On my morning bike ride in Wales today, I used my digi camera to film part of my ride. Nothing special - overseas friends wanted to see what I see on a ride. It is only a few minutes long but 38Mb big so it takes aaaaaaaaggggggeeeeess to load from my website.

There's a link to it here if you want to click on it, make dinner, eat, wash up, take the mongoose for a walk, and then come back to it.

http://tinyurl.com/kd3km

So my question is - is there a way to optimise mov files so they don't lose too much detail and yet are smaller?

Geoff

[Ed]

I've never had much to do with video formats, so I don't know much about it.  My guess would be that the best way to reduce the overall filesize (drastically) would be to reduce the screen size of the finished movie.  How to actually do it, I haven't got a clue. 

I wouldn't have thought zipping it would do any good, so that's not an option.

The only other thing I can suggest, if it's just the hosting and transfer speeds that are the problem, is for you to upload the movie to www.yousendit.com and that will allow about twenty downloads of the file over a seven day period. 

If you don't mind all and sundry seeing it, and you want to do a series of films, you could create and account and upload it to http://ourmedia.org via the internet archive.  All these options are free of charge to use, too

I hope some of that's some help, Geoff