[Tom Bottiglieri]

you should have rendered the original file out of max in the highest possible setting. I'm not sure cuz i havent used max... but it would probably be an uncompressed DV standard AVI. Then you could compress it in premiere (theres a tool in it that will size it automatically, all you have to do is give it guidelines such as frame size, and final size(under 250 mb's)) Trying to compress a compression just isnt going to work. Heres an example. Take a wav file of a song and compress it to mp3. Add this to a zip archive. Then take that original wav and do the same. You will see the pecentage each drops down is quite different. (I know this isnt what you are looking for, but it is just an example)