splitting avi's/converting avi to mpeg

[xPunkOff]

alright so i have 2 questions, first one:

i was using adobe premier to split and extract an avi, following the step by step instructions on here. 5 hours later when the file was actually split (with just the first half done, so i still had another section to go after) i went to preview it before i converted it to mpeg so i could make animated menus using ulead dvd movie factory, but their was no sound captured at all on the movie! so i went back and viewed the steps i went through and with the timeline i made i did a preview on there like i did last night. when i viewed it on the video 1a section it played fine, audio and video all great. when i tried to view audio 1 their was no sound whatsoever. now how could the sound be playing in the video section but not the audio? on the same topic i have a couple more questions. still in avi format since i hadn't converted yet, after splitting the movie in half the first section ended up being 4 gigs when the actually movie itself is only 725 megs, how is that possible? and how do i change that so that its only gonna be half the size of the movie (approximately anyways since the first section is gonna be 45 minutes and the second will be 60)? also 5 hours is soooooo long to split one movie, i have a fast computer and all so its not like its slowing down because i have an old computer since i don't. is their a way to speed up how fast it splits?

second question:

on another movie that was already under 80 minutes, the only one that i have that was short enough to make a vcd w/o splitting (nightmare before christmas). i already burned it in video format and it plays fine, but i wanted to make animated menus using ulead dvd movie factory. only all my movies are in avi format and you need mpeg to do this. so i used TMPGEnc and it was basic enough to follow, i converted it and the audio plays but theirs no picture and all i see is black. the only thing i can think of with this is that i changed that aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9. why would that take the picture off though? maybe its something else, but i really want to start work on this. so can anyone think of any suggestions?

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tia

[xPunkOff]

scratch the second question, i just got that one answered for me

but i'm still having problems with splitting movies.