Compressing from 4.94 to 4.5 GB

Yes, I should have mentioned that I tried the DVD preset and it came out to something like 3.5 GB. However, even though the file size is bigger than the 2 GB "most compatible" option, it appears to me that the 2 gig version looks a tad better. I'm not sure if I'm hallucinating since I've been looking at my computer screen for so long ;-)

In an ideal world, I'd like the file to be just small enough, for example, by 1 MB so that it can look as good as possible and still fit on a standard DVD.

Naive question: does having a layer of "video" underneath another layer of video create a larger file? Since I've set the opacity of all video clips to 100%, my guess is that it should NOT result in a larger file (like a Photoshop file that has multiple layers but is flattened before saving as, say, a .png file.

Thanks for your suggestion; I'll definitely consider going that route.

Thanks for the help; I'll give it a try :-)

For what it's worth, I didn't know how to modify the presets and that's basically what I finally decided to do. One preset is referred to as best quality. That is what I wanted: a video with the best quality possible. However, the problem was that the resulting file was just a tad too big to burn to a standard DVD. So after trying this and that, I went back and modified the bit rate. As I played with the bit rate, Compressor would show me the approximate file size. After trial and error, I was able to create an .m4v file that is just small enough to burn but as big as possible without being too big (4.53 GB).

I don't know if anyone else will face a similar situation but that's what I did and I like the quality of the resulting file. (Note that using the preset "most compatible", the file size was 2 GB.)

I hope this thread will help someone in the future; perhaps his/her choice will be different but I hope he/she will be aware of the options available :-)