How to edit films like a pro

Q. I am using Roxio Video Wave Movie Creator that came bundled on my Dell to produce movies. I recently combined some footage that I took with my DV camcorder of my son's baseball game and a DivX-coded movie that I downloaded off the Internet. The problem is that after I burned it to a DVD, the playback quality of the DivX portion was significantly lower than the portion captured from the camcorder. Is there a way to rectify this problem?
A. Good for you, you've started tapping the huge powers of home video (and audio) that I wish all owners of multimedia computers were doing.
Your problem, which might be likened to trying to mix apples with oranges, is easy enough to correct. Instead of just pasting together a movie from your own DV format home video files and those DivX files in the AVI format, you need to first convert the DivX file you downloaded into the same DV format used by your camcorder.
This is simple using that Roxio Easy Creator 7 software but, as you learned the hard way, it isn't done for you automatically.
So fire up the Videowave component of Easy Media Creator and load that downloaded DivX movie into the software. Now click on File and then pick the Output choice. In the next screen select the choice of outputting the DivX movie as a Video File.
In the menu this prompts you will be able to do the conversion so that your DivX file is of the same resolution and frame rate as your camcorder baseball game files. It will be free of any interlace and progressive scan issues that can diminish the quality of a video file when played on a television instead of a computer.
Your question gives me the opportunity to urge readers to explore this fascinating world of DivX movies, an open source movement that offers free software and huge numbers of rather startling downloadable movies to experience. The jumping-off point is www.divx.com and, who knows, the ending might come at next year's Academy Award ceremony when you take the winner's stage.
Q. I hope that you can help with this. I find I can no longer run utilities such as disk defrag, etc., because another application was using the drive. This is after I shut down every application that seemed even a possibility beyond those such as antivirus and firewall.
I tried to wipe the free space using Norton. Same disappointing result. Your thoughts, comments or advice would be greatly appreciated.
A. That ripping sound you should be hearing about now is me tearing out another clump of hair in frustration at the fact that your problem has been vexing Windows users and columnists for years and Microsoft will not deign to fix things.
Routines like ScanDisk in the past and Windows XP hard drive defragmentation tools in the present all work by moving data about the hard drive to avoid bad spots on the drive surface and to make files open faster by placing all of their parts in consecutive order on the disk. If any other software tries to write to the disk during a defragmentation session it could write over parts being altered by the other software. So Windows stops defragmentation routines if anything whatsoever opens the hard drive, which a great many background programs do.
The only fix is to reboot the computer in what is called Safe Mode and then run the repair and restoration tools from there. Safe Mode comes up with almost no drivers loaded, and all background software is excluded. Nothing is left running that could stop the defragmentation.
So reboot the computer and after the first screen flashes telling you the keyboard is active, hold down the F8 key, which will bypass normal start-up and put you in Safe Mode. Don't sweat the firewall and virus software, since your computer will not be communicating with the Internet with all of its stuff shut down and its ports closed.
You can see that this is hardly the kind of simple "plug and play" efficiency that Microsoft claims in its ads, because it requires customers to go under the hood. So Microsoft apparently decided to just ignore the issue even though thousands of customers have met frustration. Classy, eh?
XContact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or via snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.