Right now we film with a SONY A1U in HDV and then in Adobe Premier we'll convert that to an FLV file for online. So for instance, a 5 minute clip might be around 25mb once converted to FLV.

We're about to buy an HVX and convert all our instructional videos to HI DEF. My only concern is, if we're recording in HI DEF, then drop the enormous footage on the timeline and try to export that to an FLV file, all things being equal, won't the same footage shot in HI DEF be much much larger making it studder like crazy on the web?

I was thinking we may have to save our SONY A1U just for online clips, etc and keep the Pany HVX for DVD's although I'd hate this.

Any advice or experiences?

What I do in final cut is export the video to the highest quality .mov for LAN which is 640 X 360. Then I take that video and export it to a .flv in ffmpegX using an aspect ratio of 16:9 (320 x 176) and a framerate of 23.976.
Comes out real nice!

FFmpegX is Mac only, and Ricky doesn't state whether he's editing on a PC or a Mac.

Anyway, Ricky., you can output web for video at a much lower resolution that you shot at.

My film here (http://www.revver.com/watch/462228/) was shot on HDV and downconverted to a lower res for the web.

I did much like Philip advised but uploaded the MOV directly to Revver, which did the encoding to flash.