Optimizing Video

Hello All. I don’t post here that often, but I have to say that I do love Kirupa and have gotten some great help from the tutorials and threads over the years. I definitely hope to get more involved and share some knowledge.

I hope that this is in the correct thread. Basically, I’ve experimented so much with bring videos into Flash. I see so many websites that have amazing looking videos implemented into their interfaces that seem to run so well and right away… and I just don’t know how they do it! Whenever I export something from After Effects or try to implement a .mov via converting it to an .flv, the file size is too high. Then if I select and decide to load an external .flv, it is sluggish and by that time the quality isn’t really where I want it anyway because I had compressed it so much previously.

Is there something that I’m missing? How do these high end website get such fresh and wonderful looking videos to run so smooth and load so fast?

Any input would be awesome. I assure you that I’ve tried many applications and ways of doing this, but I feel at a loss.

Best wishes and thanks in advance.