Let's see if I'm finding this correctly.

I did render the entire video (before I realized my goof) and here's what I found.

The title which leads in from the beginning is full-screen size. The first video and all remaining video is much smaller - looks as if it's been shrunk down and there is a black border around the entire video.

I clicked on properties and the first clip shows under attributes: 320x240x24. I'm not finding something that says resolution, pixel aspect ratio, etc.

I don't believe this...frustrating, yes! I have loaded lots of video and made a movie and never had this happen before so I'm sure it's a setting I am missing somewhere. The other part of the problem (though hopefully it won't be a problem) is that all the video clips have come from DVDs and all were full-screen when they were imported.

Any advice is much appreciated. I've been working on a project for months for a party that is in 8 days!

Thanks again.

Here's some more info - I rendered the movie once about a month ago and it was all as described today. However, the very last clip I loaded, which was today, plays full-screen. Hopefully this will help you give me some pointers.

Thanks

Slowly but surely I'm getting some answers to you. I checked two clips - the one which had been previously been rendered and that one is 320x240x24. The one added today is 720x480x32.

Is there a way to make the entire project 720x480x32?

I've got it - sort of . I found an old copy and the video was the correct size.

Now I need to know...I am going to render this so I can load it into DVDA and do final editing, chapters, etc. What format do I use? Do I use .avi or MPEG2? Or something else?

Thanks so much.

The 320x240 video came from a DVD? Hmmm ...

It must have been on their as a computer file, not a DVD file (i.e., not something that would play in a normal DVD player).

The DVD spec permits the following resolutions:

PAL:
720 × 576 pixels MPEG-2
704 × 576 pixels MPEG-2
352 × 576 pixels MPEG-2
352 × 288 pixels MPEG-2
352 × 288 pixels MPEG-1

NTSC:
720 × 480 pixels MPEG-2
704 × 480 pixels MPEG-2
352 × 480 pixels MPEG-2
352 × 240 pixels MPEG-2
352 × 240 pixels MPEG-1

Anyway, if you are in the U.S.A., you should set the Vegas project properties to:

NTSC DV (720x480, 29.970 fps)

Put all your files on the timeline and edit. Then, render using the MainConcept MPEG-2 codec, and the DVD Architect NTSC video stream template.

I'm not positive I have this figured out or am really anywhere close but have been doing some detective work since your posts. Here's what I think...I think the old video captured on my first camcorder, which was analog, is all going to have the black frame on the left and the right. Why, I don't know. As I progress through the video, the video captured on my new digital camcorder has no frame around it at all. I had another digital camcorder in between the two mentioned.

I believe that in the past year or so, all the video I captured has been in widescreen format. When I check the properties of the clips, it shows them all in DV Widescreen; however, most of them have black on the left and right.

Would the normal and/or widescreen format be the cause of my concern?

I am going to try making a DVD to see how it plays on my TV. If you think the normal or widescreen format may be the root cause of this, please let me know. By the way, I've been working over the past 4 months making a highlight DVD for my son's graduation. I used video captured and saved to DVDs from my home movies. So nothing is copyrighted, or of professional quality.

Thank you again for all your help.

Drop your video onto GSpot.

GSpot

Just download and run (no installation required):

It will tell you exactly what resolution your video is.

If you have captured widescreen and then want to make a 4:3 video (or the other way around), you will have to live with black bars. Of course, you can go ahead and make a widescreen DVD or 4:3 DVD that matches your source (which is what I would do).

Turns out part of the video is 4:3 and part is widescreen. After messing with this for many hours, I think the resolution was the first and foremost issue. I was able to use a previously-saved (not rendered) clip and add the last two minutes back to that, in the 720 resolution and I am now creating a DVD.

Thank you so much for explaining this and commenting that I will "have to live with black bars." I believe I did not pay any attention to this before because, normally, when I create a DVD it is from one tape (such as a band concert, which is less than 1 hour in length). However, this project is comprised of clips taken from about 100 DVDs over a period of 18 years...with varied resolutions, I'm sure.

I realize each time I create a project just how little I know about Vegas but I do learn something new each time. It took me months to grasp the process of creating menus but I finally have that fairly well mastered (though I do refer to my own notes for help on occasion).

Honestly, I am glad this project is nearing its end and I have great respect for those who edit video for a living. Me, I'm just a parent wanting to do something sorta cool for my son's graduation. After all this work, I just hope someone will actually watch it!

Thank you again for your help and thank you, too for the link for the video site.

What is this GSpot web site? One link goes to a Google page with a lot of links, some in foreign languages and if that is typed in, it goes to a sexually explicit web site.

Yes, well, I suppose that doing a Google search on "gspot" would take you places you never intended to go. Click on the link that John Meyer posted above and it will take you directly to the program you want.

"would take you places you never intended to go." - but you would, most certainly would KNOW when you had . . er . . reached it?

Grazie

OK, Grazie, that made me laugh out loud.

Yeah . . heard it waaaaay over here in London. Feeling tense John? Are you? . . .