1. you need to pick a codec to compress the video. Video compression by definition lowers file size at the expense of quality. the higher size you are willing to settle for, the better quality your movie will look. But different codecs are better and worse at this. The choice you have, as I see it are MPEG-1, MPEG-4, Sorenson, 3ivx/divx/vp3
MPEG-1 is an old standard, and it generally runs about 10 MB/min. (for 320x240). They look very good, for web video, and every computer made in the last 10 years will be able to play these movies by default. that is a very big advantage for web-media. Toast comes with a good MPEG-1 encoder that is literally one-click (there is one option: NTSC or PAL).
MPEG-4 is an emerging standard. it is highly scalable, so you can get it down to about 4 MB/min with the same quality as MPEG-1, or go to as high a bitrate as you like, to better than DVD-quality (depending on your source material). The down sides to MPEG-4 are that it's new, so not many computers have the software to play it (they'll need QT 6 most likely, even windows, for now), and you'll probaby need to tinker with the settings until you get what you want.
Sorenson is included with QT 5, and has compression better than MPEG-1 and worse than the others, but is a more established standard.
3ivx/divx/vp3 all have good compression/quality, arguably better than Apple's MPEG-4 codec, and about 3-4 times better than MPEG-1, but they have the disadvantage that your audience will have to download the respective codec to play the files. They will also have settings for you to tinker with.
whatever, this post is wandering out of control. Choose a codec to compress your video, install it, and you can compress with it in Quicktime Pro with the Export command in the File menu.
2. don't know
3. there are a few programs out there to simplify the awkward process of manipulating text in Quicktime (in fact, I'm almost finished writing one now for annotations and chapter tracks). Search for Quicktime Text Track on versiontracker.com.
if you want to use Quicktime Pro, choose Import from the file menu and open any text file. Then Export it, choosing "text to text" and "text with descriptors", and go into the Options pane and change the fractions of seconds to 1/30. then save the file. when you open it in a text editor, there will be a lot of cryptic options and settings at the top, and the actual text at the bottom, separated by time points (probably just one time point if it was an empty text file in the first place. best to start with a file with your text on separate lines). Then change the time points to the ones you want, and Import the file again. Then just treat it like a normal movie clip (copy, paste, add, add scaled to combine it with your video movie)
my hands are getting tired of typing...
HTH
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