Replying to How to reduce size of video files

So i have an hd cam (vixia hf11) its my first one and i have a few simple vids i want to convert to a mpeg format or whatever and turn into a smaller filesize...

when I use the canon software it seems to have only 2 sizes available to convert to and the file size seems to be really large. Is there another software that i can use for editing and what not and to convert the file format the cam saves in

is there like a for dummies thread on filming, editing and saving?