No edits but wanted smaller files

[Canonboi]

What if I don't want to edit my 7D video files, and just wanted to send it straight to Vimeo/Youtube, but want to decrease my files sizes in half, if I convert that to a smaller file, will my 1080p @ 24p HD quality degrade or not? What should I do to reduce the size?

[barn9]

I'm sure there are probably better alternatives, and I confess that I am a novice at best, but I have tried a couple in Windows Movie Maker and reduced the file size significantly without much loss of quality. Would work fine for youtube from what I have played with.

[basroil]

Use megui for best results, or handbreak if you care less but don't want to be bogged down by the thought of making AVS scripts. You can easily recompress 1080p video to just 10mbps and still have 95% of the quality, and audio to aac. Result is less than 1gb for 13min of 1080p video. You can also use either program to resize the video (make sure to use lanczos) to 720p (vimeo only allows 720p) and then you can use as little as 2000kbps (your 4gb file will then be 200mb instead) and still have acceptable quality for those sites.