MovieXone editing problems

[Locutus0985]

I’m new at this and having a few problems. I want to cut certain scenes from some video clips, merge what’s left into a movie and save it in a format I can write to CD. I also want to use freeware and I want it to support all 4 major video formats: avi, mpg, wmv, and mov. The program I’m using is MovieXone which seems to have good reviews on the web. It’s free and supports all the formats I mentioned. However, I’m not getting very far. I downloaded 3 .mov clips of the current Mars mission. The total size of the 3 clips is about 8.5MB and the total length is about 7 minutes (2.5, 3, and 1.5 minutes). The clips are meant to be played in a particular order: launch (clip 1), entry (clip 2), exploring mars (clip3). I edited the clips so the credits at the end of clip 1 and 2 would not be there. I then combined them into 1 movie.

So far, so good. I then needed to save it in one of the formats I mentioned. In movieXone, you first go to “Render Setup” and choose the format (Digital Video AVI, Microsoft Video AVI, Quicktime MOV, Windows Media Video WMV), frame rate, size, renderer (“AIST OpenGL Renderer” or “M3 Final Renderer”), and quality (draft, preview, normal, highest). After that, you choose the “Render” command. I experimented with all 4 formats on highest quality using both renderers and different frame rates. The result is always the same. The created movie is HUGE. The originals totaled 8.5MB and 7 minutes. What I created was over 100MB. Then I realized there were compression options that one could apply to both video and audio. I’ve been experimenting with that, but there are too many options. Each time I change the file format the compression options change - .MOV does not have the same compression options as .AVI. Also, my last attempt resulted in a movie that froze on the first frame – a picture of mars – but the audio played fine. I don’t know if that’s because I chose the wrong combination of video and audio compression or what. Also, saving to WMV doesn’t seem to work at all. MovieXone just freezes every time I try to save it as a WMV file.

Can anyone tell me what format, frame rate, renderer and compression I should use to get a movie of the same quality and size as the originals? Or, can anyone recommend a better program, as this one seems to have a few bugs like not saving to WMV files. Thanks a lot for your help.

[Locutus0985]

Sorry for the corruption. I wrote it in Word first and the site doesn't seem to like Word's apostrophe ('). Wherever you see &#8217, just pretend it's a '. Thanks.