Mainly just looking for a solid community suggested program to edit videos or actually to compress them. All I'm really going to do is try to reduce the file size of video files that are 2 min. in length but 2gb in size.

What do the members of SEN use for this sort of thing?

Virtualdub with xvid codec is a common solution. IskatuMesk is gosu at this sort of thing so send him an IM or something. I actually use blender most of the time because I cut stuff and then compress at the same time, but I can't be bothered explaining how to do it and vdub with xvid usually compresses better anyway.

For editing, I'd use Adobe Premiere if you can get your hands on it. It's the closest alternative to AVID (which we use professionally) for PC. I'd also use it to compress, but really anything that can let you export a video with different codecs/settings will do the trick. I'm not sure what your video codecs are now, but that's where you'll get most of the file reduction done. All the compression I've done for work uses the H264 codec, so I'm not familiar with xvid myself, but I know that is effective as well.

Honestly it doesn't matter too much what codec you use, because you'll still end up getting it WAYYYYYYY down from 2GB assuming you set it up properly. ffmpeg command line will work just as well as anything else really.

Where I'm from it makes a huge difference.

Personally I use Avidemux. There's even .zip versions that don't need installation.
And if that's all you are going to do I really recommend it because it has an intuitive UI, but it still offers many useful formats which you can control precisely, or just use standard settings depending on your needs.

Jack mentioned Virtual Dub which is another excellent program for the above tasks, but I've had compatibility issues with it in the past, so I'm not using it anymore.

Nude's suggestion worked fine. Turned a 1.5min video with the filesize of 2gb into 140mb which is what I was looking for. Neat.

This is going to sound mad, but I honestly use Real Video to compress movies with. Only to compress mind you, simply because Youtube accepts the codec, and I turned a 5gb file into 78 megs.

Still got to work on my mic though

Le Vid:


Youtube itself also offers a very basic video editor for moments when you need to chop off the first 5 seconds of a vid, simply because you realize some kind of noise made it through.