compressing .mov files
 

Is there a free program out there that can compress .mov files? My digital camera makes huge movies (4mb or so for 15 seconds), and has no options to lower the initial quality that i can find (olympys c700uz). I'm guessing that quicktime pro would get the job done, but I really only will need to do this too a couple of movies to make emailing them easier to friends and family, so I hate to put the 30 bucks into something that I'm going to use like 3 times. I've googled my heart out, with no luck. Any ideas?

have you tried zipping them? If that doesn't work, you can use a video editing program that can read .mov files and re-encode them to a different type, like divx, that'd be smaller.

Try Camtasia Studio. They have a free demo. http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp

Camtasia Producer, included in tha package (scroll down a bit for its features list) will resize Quicktime files.

If you have a full version of QuickTime you can save the file in a different format at a much lower filesize.

http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm (first one)

free though recently theyve started asking for contribs, does what you want and a lot more,...

http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_main.html

then download:

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/tools?tool=277

so that you can open the .mov file with tmpgenc. Then you can convert those crappy mov files to something a little more device independent. .mpg. Whenever I send movies out to my family that I have taken with my camera, i convert them to mpg because I don't want to have to force them to download quicktime. You can mess with the quality as well, lowering the file size.