I have been lent a video editing machine to keep me occupied post surgery/rehab. It is a P4, 2 gig ram etc. Also it has a Matrox capture card and the full Adobe Production Studio Suite.

Since I am jumping into this at thedeep end I am treading water.

A project that I am working on for a friend:
HE was in a movie. Hegave me the DVD of the movie. Project is to capture the movie and code it into a form that I can pull short sceens from it. Because its a copy protected item that is a issue.
I have been able to pull off the frames from the dvd with A DVD app but have a difficult time deciding what to save it as; that is what to code it. At first I coded it as an avi file but Premiere would not see the video of it. Then I saved it as a mpeg. The video and audio imported into Promiere, I was able to pull off the sections I needed, arrainve them in the order desited.
All seemed fine. The very short clip to be used in Apples Keynote was exported as a quicktime file. IT playes but OH so small! I played it in Quicktime. Then saving the same file as an mov as well but small.
I know I am doing something wrong is as that I dont seem to know how to convert, encode, save teh resulting clip in a size that is reight.
need help here.
also, what is the difference between avi Xvid and avi DivX?
I just tried another endocing to avi Xdiv again after importing into premier the audio is present but not the video. Might be the software I am using to encode the dvd.
Help here would be most approciated as I am spending a lot of time hit and miss. As I mentioned I was able to encode the dvd as a mpg do all the editing and then exported as a quicktime file gave me a small image. The setting I used in the dvd riop app was super video CD. I might be starting Premiere in the wrong place for the outcome I want. I open the project in DV-NTSC 48hz
Suggestions as to porgrams to use, methods that I am at fault with and the correct place to post this would be great,
much thanks,
OregonS