Hey - I have been playing with Quicktime Pro (best $30 I ever spent) and wanted to ask what quality settings people generally use for their outputs.

I can output to many things, but MP4, H.264 and DivX seem to be the best options. I have a 45MB 1:20 avi file (320*200) that I have been experimenting with.

MP4 @ 256 kbps shows loads of artifacting, but is a cool 3MB
MP4 @ 512 kbps is better but not as good as the original, that's 6MB
MP4 @ 1024 kbps is almost identicial to the original, coming in at 11MB

The MP4 decodes take about 10 seconds.

h.264 @ 512 kbps is far noticeably better than the MP4 quality, but worse than the original AVI. I was suprised by this. at 700kbps it's as good. But decoding (exporting) takes about a minute and a half.

The DivX decode take about a minute and @ 550kbps, looks about the same as the MP4, i.e. worse than h.264 quality for the same bit rate.

Obviously these are subjective!

In any case, I can reduce the file size from 45MB to around 12MB with very little, if any loss in quality. I'm interested in other people's settings for home movie clips.