[Kevin Sevcik]

Compressing a compression, I think, has different issues than are being discussed here. I can't see doing a lossy compression twice as actually increasing file size by a significant amount. However, doing lossy compression twice will definitely adversely affect the quality of the video.

So basically, I agree with most here. Render the animation as an uncompressed AVI, or a series of lossless compressed TIFs, then dump that into Premiere, edit what you want, and compress it from there. Premiere should give you enough options to fiddle with the compression quality and get it down to size. I wouldn't let premiere actually resize the video to get it to size though. Aside from the video resolution formatting requirements, resizing the video will, again, mess with the quality. If it absolutely has to be resized, render it again if you have time.

Also note, the plus about rendering to a series of TIFs is that you can grab a load of your teammates spare computers, network them, and do a network render over a weekend.