I'm new to all this, so forgive me if I sound stupid.

I have been sending video clips with sound to a friend in New Zealand but have to keep them short as the file size is quite large (8Mb typical) and he's on a really slow dial-up ISP so it's taking him 2 hours to download them. I'm on broadband so don't appreciate the problem he's having. The clips are created using a Canon A60 Digital camera in movie mode and are sent in AVI format. Is there any way of compressing these to reduce the size using something like Winzip etc? Alternatively does anyone know of an online area like Sony Imagestation or Canon Image Gateway that I can store them on and can be viewed via the web?

If all else fails I'll just have to make them shorter!

[m@rk]

Assuming he is using Windows, you might want to consider downloading the free windows media encoder from the Microsoft site.

With this you can then convert the file into WMV format but more importantly change the size, quality etc to get the file sizes down.

Don't forget that this is not a magical fix. Smaller files = lower quality but you should be able to find a compromise between size and quality.

Excellent advice - I've just had a look at the technical info and it sounds just the ticket. I also found out that there is an alternative lower resolution that the video mode can be set to on the camera so this should reduce them too. I'll download the Windows Media Encoder tonight and experiment.

Thanks for the info.