Compressing a video to under 100MB, & retaining its quality

[EkaCoralian]

For the past few weeks, I've been having a bit of trouble saving a video in .mp4 to something in Widescreen, under 100MB, and keeping its high quality.
I've switched the settings around a bit for Sony Vegas 8 Pro (changing the width & height, since each clip is set in 16:9, and setting the rendering quality to, "good" shows pixels at transitions unfortunately.)

What I've been trying to do is get my videos to render in Widescreen, same quality as the clips, in .mp4 under 100MB. I don't know of many good Video Compressing Softwares, so if anyone could recommend something for what I'm aiming for, it'd be much appreciated (or just help me out on some settings, that would help a lot as well.)

[LivingFlame]

You're best bet is to render a lossless file out of Vegas (Huffyuv, Lagarith or Uncompressed), then:

http://zarxrax.kicks-ass.net/

Use this to compress to MP4. Just load your file and press the button.

[JediNight]

If Vegas is rather cryptic on their encoding options (aka "good") instead of letting you set actual bitrates, etc. then I would just render it out lossless and use another program for your final encode. Set up the lossless output in an Avisynth script, then make a final encode with X264 (Megui) or something. Someone also mentioned Zarx264 which I assume is some type of easy H264 encoding front-end Zarxrax whipped up.

[EkaCoralian]

Ok, now what is a lossless file, and how do I make/render it? ^^;;

[LivingFlame]

You render it the same way you render any file. Just go to the Video tab of the Render As window and change the codec to something lossless, which would be Lagarith, Huffyuv, and Uncompressed. Lagarith and Huffyuv can be obtained through the AMVapp.