I just bought a second computer to mess around with. It's used, and I'm going to slowly fix it up and use to test out apps, experiment with etc. It came with Windows XP on it and after I booted it up, I looked around to see what was on there.

The first that that caught my attention was that there were several video- related apps installed, Ulead DVD Movie Maker, GEAR Video and Xilisoft Video Converter.I soon discovered why that was all in there too when I explored a second drive and saw several video files in a folder.

Now I should mention at this point that, even though I know computers fairly well. I never messed around at all with video or DVD burning or anything.I've been strictly an audio guy, I use Rhapsody for that.

So my curiosity kicked in and I wanted to see what these files were. Turns out they were movie files, in AVI format. One was actually a movie I liked too, "Rudy". So, since I've been thinking about joining a Movie subscription service for some time anyway, I thought I'd play around with these files and the video software, to kind of get the hang of things. There's a DVD burner on the machine too, so I thought I was all set.

First though I clicked on the file and it fired up in Windows Media Player to see what it looked like. The clarity and sound were ok, so the next day I bought some blank DVD's and started messing around with the Ulead app. That's when I got my first big surprise! Although in it's raw form the file was only 700 MB's, when I loaded it into Ulead, it displayed it as being over 5 GB's!

I thought "what the heck" but proceeded forward with the setup and burn process anyway. Right away Ulead warned me that it was too big to put on a standard DVD, but it would try to compress it using something called DVDFit. I went ahead with it, but the process was very slow, so I eventually aborted.

But I wanted to figure out why that file became so large when I loaded it in Ulead. Luckily, when I first watched it in WMP, I remembered that I saw a DivX logo on it. I looked that up on the internet and discovered that DivX is a compression tool, so that explained that.

But my question is, "is it still supposed to expand that much when you load it into your burning program? Another odd thing is that I then tried to burn it using the GEAR Video, and it said nothing about being too big for a DVD. In fact, it did a nice job of burning the file.

So why would a video file be too large to burn in one program and fine in another? i don't understand that at all! Anyway I also messed around with one of the other video files, just for the heck of it and, just like before , I first fired it up in WMP.

The first thing that caught my eye was that there were about one inch black bars on each side of the video, which I thought looked terrible. Luckily though, with my experience editing audio I quickly deducted that maybe I could increase the size, then burn it.

I figured that's probably why the former owner probably had Xilisoft Video Converter on there. So I loaded up the Xillisoft with the file and eventually found my way to some settings where I could tweak the resolution and size and all. It didn't take long to do, then I burned it onto a DVD.

When I played it back though, there was no change in video size, which really baffled me! But the next day I emailed Xilisoft about that and he said his software will not get rid of black bars. But does that mean there is software out there that will enlarge a file like that? And are some of these movie files just unchangeable?

I close here because I know this is getting long. I look forward to your suggestions and comments.

The original file was a DivX video which is compressed.
When you import it into a program like Ulead, it uncompresses the video to raw footage.
You can then edit it and then save it (Transcode) to several different formats.
Transcoding and compressing can take a very long time especially on an older computer. My older computer used to take 20 hours to transcode 90 minutes of video into the mpg2 format.

Also, different video software have their own way of converting video and some are faster then others. The best I have found is a program called ConvertX to DVD.
It's made by VSO and can convert many formats into the DVD format very quickly.

The bars on the side of the video were added in by whatever software was used to encode the video.
If a video that has less resolution (Screen Size) then what a standard tv screen has the person usually has a few choices.
One is to stretch the video size to fit the screen. This has it's drawbacks as the video starts to pixelate or the images look distorted.
Another option, which is what you are seeing, is to add black bars around the original resolution video as a filler.
The feeling is that when displayed on a tv screen the black bands won't be noticed although the video size itself will be smaller then the actual tv screen.

You may want to check out this forum;
Cd Club Freaks
They have extensive knowledge about audio and video editing along with some great tutorials and software reviews.

Hope this helps you out.

TaZMAn,

Thank you for your reply. Ever since i posted my initial "I'm an idiot, help me with video" post, everyone has been so nice to help get me jump started. I must tell you honestly though, now I'm started to get information overload! But that's ok!

In fact, I've created a Word file where I add all of the comments I received so I can refer back to them from time to time.

Also, I am aware that no matter how much help you have coming in, you have to just start experimenting yourself. And once you do that, then you can start asking more specific questions about a certain program or how to adjust video size or bitrate or whatever.

That leads to my first question about the Ulead DVD Movie Factory. It's a wonderfull program, though a bit large, but you hit the nail right on the head. For some reason, and it happened again last night, I wanted to burn a movie to DVD. But once I loaded it, I ran into that same problem as before. It read the file as being like GB's in size!

Now I should mention before I get more into this, that my software lineup has changed, as I am trying out many, many programs very rapidly, then having to uninstall some that don't fit my needs. I had to do that with AVS Video Tools. They also took a compressed 702 MB file that I loaded and it quickly expanded so large that the next message to me was actually a suggestion that said, "we recommend you burn this onto two disks".

Well that won't work, so I uninstalled it. But currently I have the Ulead DVD Movie Maker Plus, the Ulead Video Studio, which does about the same thing as Movie Maker Plus, so I may uninstall that. The only reason I got that was that I thought I might have more editing options in that.

I'm also running a program on a suggestion for a volunteer at another tech site, DVD Flick. I'm actually very impressed with this free program and it doesn't give me any hassles as far as size or anything. I burned one movie successfully with that. But last night while starting my setup to burn a new movie, the first thing it told me was that the file had no thumbnail ????. I thought "ok, whatever", and I proceeded anyway.

The file came in letterbox format and looked good when I first checked it in WMP. But I wanted to enlarge it a little bigger if I could, some of those letterboxes can be kind of skinny you know. So I had the screen size set at 16.9. Actually I think it already set it to 16.9 by default after it read my file

So I moved forward and input my setting preferences and was ready to burn. But it would not burn because of something to do with the file not having that thumbnail. This problem is a little advanced for me right now, so I'm just chalking this one up to experience for now and am not going to try to figure out what went wrong.

All I know is, time was getting late and I wanted to get that thing burned to a DVD somehow, so we could watch a movie last night.. I then tried the Ulead Video Studio, but ran into some sort of trouble that I can't remember. Then I tried the Ulead DVD Movie Factory and, of course I went through the same thing I mentioned earlier.

And, just like one time before, I proceeded forward anyway, because I know the Ulead will eventually tell you that your file is too large for a standard DVD. But then it will offer you the option of squeezing it down with their DVDFit component. The trouble is, that takes a long time to complete and i just wanted to get the dern thing burned, fairly quickly, without too much fuss.

So I loaded back in The Ashampoo Burning Studio, which I had used once before. It's actually a decent little program that gives you very few problems, and it burned in about an hour and a half.

Now I should mention at this point I am kind of a perfectionist when it comes to the other parts of the whole movie burning process, What I'm talking about are the menu's that are created at the start of the DVD burn setup. I like them simple, but as professional looking as possible. The Ulead makes some fantastic ones, Ashampoo's are not that great, and the DVD Flick just offers a few to choose from.

I also like a program where I can edit the menu's to add my own fonts and the size of the fonts, plus be able to move things around a bit. So for me, I'd like it to come down to just having one or two programs, that can burn my projects at a decent speed and offer the option creating real nice looking menu's.

I've done some research on the best burning programs out there, so another one I am going to try is the Sony DVD Architect. Also, like I mentioned in my first post, I also tried the Xilisoft DVD Creator. It did an ok job of burning, but here again, it offers limited menu options. One thing I did like about the program though was that it allowed you to import your own background for a menu, so I got busy and just made a simple black background and pasted a professional looking gold DVD logo in it. It came out fairly nice.

One other little story to mention, then I promise I'll try to start winding this up. You were talking about those files with black bars already on them. I had this documentary that intialy had a resolution of like 320 x 240 or something. When I played it back on WMP it was like a small square in the middle of the screen. It looked terrible.

But I ran it through one of my programs, I think it was the Xillisoft, and was able to almost double it in size. But still, I was not happy with that and ran it through another program, though I can't remember which one now because I've tried so many, and was actually able to get it to look very decent. It ended up looking like a large letterbox. I think what I did with that was set the screen size on 16.9.

But I hope not to have to edit and blow up some of these things all of the time. I'd just like to keep it simple and somehow get a decent looking playback of my burned project, with that nice menu that I mentioned. And if I have to edit or blow up, I want to know a simple way to do that.

I'm going to scour the Ulead help files today to see if there's anything on there about adjusting bitrate, because I'd really like to keep the program if I can and I don't want to have to go through this DVDFit option every time. There's got to be a way with that program where I can get it to read the file differently and have it load in a size under 4,7 GB's. But so far, I have not seen any option to do that. Do you have the Ulead DVD Movie
Factory?

By the way, I hope you don't mind, but I broswed through your profile and I must say, I am impressed. I also liked your attitude about keeping busy and pursuing all of the things your interested in. We also have a little bit in common as I have led a life of variety myself. I was in radio as a disc jockey and newsman for twenty years at a fairly big station in Tucson, AZ.

I also spent three years in the Army as a Military Policeman, and I received my degree in Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. I too bumped into computers and fell in love with learning to take them apart, tweak and upgrade them, build systems and maintain, optimize and troubleshoot software and operating systems. I actually have my A+ certification too, though I never ended up working in the field.

Anyway I will stop here. I'm very detail oriented when it comes to computers and I can end up sometimes writing some long replies.

Jan LaFata
Yuma, AZ

You are correct!
No matter how much you read or are told how to do something, you will learn better by just trying it. It is wise of you to keep a word doc of all comments as a reference. Saves lots of backtracking and hunting.

Ulead was purchased by Sony years ago. So you may also want to try the Sony forums for info.

Ulead as well as the Sony video editing software has some weird flukes. Also, not all the needed codecs for these programs may be installed.
I seem to remember that Vegas Studio would render your videos to a handful of formats but if you wanted to render to a DVD it required you to purchase the add-on DVD codec.

As you try and learn, you will start to get a better feel of the software and get to know what works best for you. Each piece of software has their good and bad points.
Ulead's DVD Architect and Video Studio had the best menu editors and add-in effects.

Here is a tip for you that I learned a long time ago.
Make your DVD file and ignore the size warnings.
Save it to a file instead of trying to burn it to a DVD right away.
Get hold of a burning program called Clone DVD made by slysoft.com
It will take your file, transcode it to size and burn it.
On an older system this may take an hour or more to do but the quality is top notch.

16:9 formats will be wide screen or letterbox style.
4:3 is the standard NTSC standard.

Standard DVD resolution is 720 X 480
720p High Res is 1280 X 720
1080i High Def is 1920 X 1080

You can use the above resolutions as a guide for where your video file will fit into.
As an example, your 320 X 240 video file is out of 'square' so to speak to even make it as a DVD format.
It's a true 4:3 ratio file but if we resize it by doubling it, we get a 640 X 480 file.
The 320 size is 44.5% of the 720 size standard.
Where as the 240 is exactly 50% of the 480 size in the DVD standard.

What happens when you resize a file like that to a DVD standard format is two fold.
You get a major loss of quality and you get that stretched faces and scenes look.
Kind of a distorted blur.

Also, if the file is a DivX formatted video file, you can burn it as is to a Cd and if your DVD player supports DivX formats it will play it like a regular DVD.

I also mentioned in my earlier post about a program called ConvertX to DVD.
It has come a long way since it first appeared but I'm not sure if the Menu editing would be up to what you are looking for. It does allow different fonts, colors and backgrounds but placement is limited and it takes a number or tries to understand how it all works. But if their newer versions reflect the changes of their older ones, this should not be an issue very soon.
Their first few versions gave you no choices other then what template you wanted to use.

There are plenty of free but older software available. I will get to that in a moment.
When I posted my reply I wanted to give you a link for two other sites but forgot.
The first is AfterDawn and is another good video sight with lots of good tutorials and articles.
AfterDawn

The other site is where you can get free codecs. They are mainly for playback but there are a few that are also used for rendering.
FreeCodecs

I'd recommend the XP Codec Pack as it has the most popular codecs and doesn't mess up the system like some of the other packs did.

Now about the software. They used to have an extensive download section of free video software at AfterDawn but a few years ago they decided to dump them because of the fear they might be sued by the video and entertainment industry.
Seems those entities feel you don't have a right to edit or convert video unless you use their approved software.
You see, some of that freeware stuff was powerful. You could use some of them to make copies of copy protected DVD's. Also there was a question about infringement of software patents.

But it's still available on the internet in various places.
And it is still free and as far as I know, it is still legal to use and share.
AfterDawn was just being cautious. They didn't want to loose their fantastic forum.

Well I'll close for now. Will check in later.
BTW........ I'll be going after both my A+ Cert and my Networking Cert. Hope to have both within 6-8 months.
I have the practical experience and knowledge just not the papers saying so.
LOL!!