iMovie makes files smaller?

[Sambo110]

I have a movie, it was around 9.6 megs big. I put it in iMovie, clicked upload to Youtube and apparently medium quality would only be around 3.1 megs. Any idea why? Seems like the best way to upload them.

 

[BlueRevolution]

iMovie is converting the video to a lower quality for upload, hence the smaller file size.

 

[Sambo110]

Oh, damn. Would the lower quality be a lot worse than just uploading it straight to Youtube?

 

[fpar]

No because youtube would do that anyway.