Hi all. I hate to post this again, but I didn't get any responses the first time, and I really need some help. I hope

I've got a home movie that was given to me on a DVD, and I've got go put it onto a Web site in the Windows Media format. Unfortunately, Studio 11 Ultimate doesn't offer a "DVD-resolution" (720X480) setting, and if I choose any of the 4:3 aspect ratio ones, the people in the video look squished (tall and narrow), as you can imagine. The presets I have that refer to "720p" are all for high-res videos ("HDV"), and are actually 1280x720.

Is there a profile I'm supposed to see (but for some reason, don't) when making movies that will allow me to take a standard (that is, not high-def), DVD-res video and make a .WMV out of it? I don't want to use MPEG-2, QuickTime, DiVX or Real Media, since not all the viewers will have those codecs/programs available to them. The audience for this is pretty low-tech, and if they can't see the video in the first few seconds (or if it looks squished), they'll just call to complain instead of trying to figure out why.

I must be missing something, because I can't imagine Studio doesn't have a way to "shrink" standard DVD-res video into something suitable for the Web using Windows Media.

I tried Windows Media Encoder, and it had no presets for this, either. When I tried to "force" one of the settings to convert the file to .WMV while retaining the aspect ratio, WME just crashed.

Thanks again!

This appears to be either a codec issue within Studio or a bug on the WMV profile because even if its stated as 640x480 on the details it will still render your 16x9 project in Widescreen without any streching. I just tried this on 11 and 12 with the backyardcircus and ourfunvacation samples respectively and came up with the same results (unfortunately). Whats important here is you are allowing Studio to select the best format for your video by selecting "Set from first clip added to project". See the steps below.

1. Open a new project, click on Setup and choose "Project Preferences".  Select "Set from first clip added to project" in the project format field. Click Ok and click File and choose "New Project"
2. Put the imported DVD titles on your timeline.
3. Do edits (if none proceed to Step 4)
4. Go to Make move and choose Windows Media from the "Types" pull down list
5. Choose "High Quality Upload NTSC"
6. Click create file.

More discussion about this here.

Marc,

That did it!

I also found that "Medium Quality Upload NTSC" would work, while giving me a considerably smaller file size, which I needed.

Makes me wonder which other presets would work, or which ones would allow me to re-size the video down to 360X240.

I guess I can spend some time trying the others....

Thanks again, Marc.

Steve