Not Ready For Prime Time

I had something in mind to post today that I thought would be pretty nifty but I'm afraid I'm having a little trouble with the technical details. My camera, like many other digital cameras out there, has the ability to record a few seconds of audio and video and I had a light-bulb moment yesterday. I thought "Hey! That would be fun - I'll turn it on and say hi to everyone and it'll be a little like the audio blogger thing only the link would go to a video instead of just a sound clip." So I tried it and it works fine. It would be simple enough to set up the link. BUT...(you knew there was a "but" coming, right?)...my little 20 second video clip turned out to be a 5+ MB file!! That's a LOT of bytes for a few seconds of seeing and hearing me say a half-dozen sentences. It would take a few minutes to download on even a speedy connection and would be just ridiculous for those on dial-up. Hell, I wouldn't wait that long to see and hear me talk! So for now I'm putting the idea on hold. I still have the video clip saved to my files, and still like the idea of it, but there's no way I'm going to bother unless I can figure out how to compress it down to less than 2 MB, and ideally I'd like to get it down to closer to 1 MB. If anyone out there has any experience with this stuff and would like to throw some helpful hints my way, I'm listening! Until then I guess I'll just keep on typing. It may be just as well. I didn't do anything special with the lighting and my hair looked very, very red while my skin looked very, VERY white. I think I looked a bit like a really lame and dorky vampire. I might have frightened small children...or made them laugh until they wet themselves. Ahem. Even if I get this figured out one of these days I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for someone to ask me to be on TV!!