You can also save the movie as a series of still images. When you've got all the frames rendered use one of the many video-related tools to combine and compress them into video. This will accomplish 2 things. First, you will have perfectly rendered images (no artifacts from compression) for your archives. Second, you can use the same images as a source to try various compression methods and movie formats (avi, .mpg, mov, DivX etc.) to see which gives you the best quality/file size balance. FWIW, QuickTime Pro (available at www.apple.com for $29) is quite useful for a number of editing functions. The QuickTime player is free - the $29 buys you a serial number that unlocks added funcationality.

Before they made me they broke the mold!
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