yes i know this may sound stupid(dont laugh)but.....
 

how do you compress files in premiere? haha i know dont laugh

If you are working with DV, the video is already compressed.

Might you mean how to scale the image size down? Or maybe change compression algorithyms to something like MPEG?

If you want to output to a different AVI compression or QuickTime
go to File -> Export Timeline -> Movie

You can also use a stand alone encoder such as TmpGENC.

http://www.tmpgenc.com/

That will let you compress using various codecs including MPEG2.

You could also try:

http://www.virtualdub.org/


Finally, in order to avoid outputting a huge .avi file from Premiere first, and then compressing it, you can use a videoserver plugin to Premiere. That will "pipe" the output from Premiere directly into the compressor program. You can find a video server plugin (and a nice diagram of how it works) here:

http://www.videotools.net/index.php?rub=guides&htm=intro2pvsp.htm


Hope that helps

Hans Henrik

Oh, and one more thing...

If you need to compress heavily, go to www.divx.com and download a free divx player/codec.

Once installed you can use the DivX codec in virtualdub/tmpgenc.

Hans Henrik