Best portable HD video batch conversion prog?
I need to convert 18G of hires 720p h.264 movs to something smaller and compressed like 720p or 320p motion jpeg high compressed (basically I need editing proxies in .mov containers)

What would y'all suggest?

I don't know if vdub can handle .mov, but I use if for batch video processing (like xvidding camera movies so that they're not gargantuan)

autodesk cleaner won't work with qt 7
in the end
after about 30 apps
I end up with Sorenson Squeeze and a couple other small ones that worked.
I can't believe this was as difficult as it was.
I am actually debating never touching MOV as a format again. Seriously. This was a pain in the .........

update fyi
In the end I had to actually use the batch feature in premiere pro 2
I didn't want to go the 2G install of the CS series
and prem 6.5 flaked on a couple of the files that were ratched.

After my initial happiness with sorenson I tried a full batch and it ran at about 10 times slower than premiere
it took 5-7 full seconds to load each clip, and wouldn't let me set the batch until it had imported all of them.
An hour later, I was still waiting to set things going before I could leave. Nice quality, but I needed fast half res batching of the files. Couldn't set 23.98FPS(as the source is) on sorenson either, it rounded up to 24FPS

I will never use .mov for another project.

Personally, I'm offended that Jobs hasn't put a batch feature on his quicktime "PRO" product. Without it, it really isn't very "pro". In fact I'll call it "lame". Oh, crap, there's already an encoder called that...

Now that he's miffed me on his proprietary file format again and the inability to batch 360+ files at once to make small proxies, I'll never switch to a mac.
Final cut was the only thing I was wanting, and since it's too big and not properly multiprocessed, I'll stick with premiere for my base edit before afx compositing.

Premiere 6.5 actually. It seems to work fine for timeline editing the .mov files and the instals 70meg compared to 600M for prem pro 2, and 1.5-3G for the CS series.

I might even be able to portablize prem 6.5 with thinapp so I can edit from a key, I just need to figure out how to optimize memory/scratch use in thinapp applications, they don't do well with large datasets in my experience with them so far.

MOV is not a popular container. MKV is the most popular and supported container for HD content (especially x264). Sometimes the best way to handles the files is to extract the audio and video and then process each separately and then rejoin them.

I don't think I can load an mkv into premiere though, I should try it.