Video compositing in Panther

Not so much a system question as an application question but this seems
the most obvious group to ask...

I've finally produced something resembling a complete animation (a little
over a minute) in Blender 3D. I rendered to PNG files, then re-rendered
those to Quicktime from the Blender Sequencer. I took this video output
into HyperEngine AV to combine with the audio track and then output to MOV
again. This leaves me with a 70Mb file and this is where things get
depressing.

None of the available options in HyperEngine seem to solve the filesize
dilemma satisfactorily. The inbuilt AVI output option insists on a
standard image ratio which might be okay in normal circumstances but I
rendered a tall thin video, not a short wide one :(

I've tried a variety of compression options in HyperEngine using Quicktime
output but can't get the file below 20Mb even on attrociously low quality
(There are more to try but it's getting frustrating now). I've reduced the
image size to 180x320px but the files are still too big.

I have a copy of ffmpegx but quite frankly, it just doesn't work (for me).
I either get a video file with no audio track or the encoding fails for
any of a host of reasons, none of which mean anything to an ignoramus like
me. The whole interface and a barely explained variety of options leave me
feeling somewhat inadequate. (The "simply drop a file, choose a format
then press go" thing never works - ever. There's alway a problem which
might just as well be explained in German for all the sense it makes to
me)

I really could use some pointers on producing an acceptable, sharable
output of modest size on anything that will work reliably and relatively
easily in OSX Panther (10.3.9) - and you guessed it, prefereably for no
cost. I just want to get my Blender output combined with audio then output
to an acceptable size.

If I must spend money on this, will Quicktime Pro serve my purposes? Is
there somewhere I can read an idiot's intro to it to get some idea of what
it can do? I've also seen Final Cut Express mentioned somewhere. Will this
do the job and how does it differ from QT-Pro?

Thanks in advance.

--
Andy D.
.