burned cd only plays half of the movie

[Guest]

I burned a cd movie which is about 20 minutes long.
About half way through, the movie freezes but the sound keeps going.
It is only supposed to be 128 megs, so I would assume the cd has enough
room for the total movie.
What am I doing wrong?

 

[Wojo]

Does the clip play properly from your hard drive using a Media Player?

 

[Guest]

Hi Wojo, I have been reading posts for over an hour
and see that you are very helpful to many questions.
The movie does play entirely in the moviemaker program.
I do not have it saved on my hard drive because when I tried to save it to the
hard drive, the time kept increasing to over 2000000 minutes.
I asked about this in another post, and someone suggested to burn it
directly onto
a cd instead of trying to put it on the hard drive.
I was using my new laptop with 1 gig ram and 80 gig hard drive.
After reading other posts, I am thinking that a laptop is not the best
option when
dealing with videos.
I didn't use any jpegs or other media, just clips from my digital camera
that I saved onto my hard drive. I think they are avi.

Thank you for any help.
Duane

I do have another desk top computer that may work better, but I thought the
laptop would

 

[Wojo]

Your right laptop's "generally" aren't the best computers for video editing.
I am not sure where you read to burn your movie directly to CD when having
issues saving it to your hard drive but that is not good advice as you are
finding out. All you end up doing in that case is creating a coaster out of
your CD. There are a lot of possible reasons for not being able to save your
project to your hard drive but we'll talk about some of the most common.

1) One is simple. Find out if your hard drive is formatted FAT32 or NTFS by
right clicking the drive in "My Computer" and selecting properties. If it is
formatted FAT32 then you are limited to a 4GB filesize which is pretty
useless in video editing. If it is NTFS then your ok so we can move on.

2) You said you "think" the clips from your camera are AVI. Did you capture
them from the camera using WMM or transfer them a different way? You want to
make sure the clips are AVI and not MPEG. If they are MPEG they should be
converted to AVI. If not then we can move on but first, do you have audio in
the project and is it MP3? If so that could also be the problem - convert it
to WMA or WAV.

3) I know you said your project is only about 20 minutes long but they may
be too long for your laptop's resources to be able to render properly if you
have a lot of transitions, overlay's, effects etc... making the project too
complex. If this is the case see my website Movie Maker Trouble Shooting and
find the "How to Split a Project" instruction and split the project into
pieces. If you don't feel complexity is the issue here's one more.

4) Honestly I just like to hear myself type.. Your best bet is probably
to transfer the clips to your desktop computer and do the job there.

-Wojo

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your suggestions, Wojo. I will check them out when I get home
tonight. I did do a lot of transitions and effects with this project. I
think since this was
my first attempt, I thought I was going to be the next Steven Spielberg. lol.

 

[Guest]

Wojo,
yes the movies are in AVI format and yes my drive is formatted NTFS.
I do not have any music in the program, however I see that I only have
40 gig left on my hard drive, so I imagine that I really need to use my
desktop for
making movies.

 

[Wojo]

40GB may be the issue. When saving in DV-AVI the file is something like 13mb
per minute of video and you need twice that free for rendering.
-Wojo