Movie Encoding Project Help

[sgunners]

Hello...

I am new here and I must say this forum has an abundance of information and has kept me busy the last 3 days. I am completely new to the world of movie encoding and would like to get into it.

I have used Premiere Pro CS3/Sony Vegas/Avid (Avid buggy because it doesn't support ATI cards).

I have a generally good idea of what i'm doing but it seems like what I'm trying to do cannot be accomplished for some reason. Here is my dilema:

--


I would like to create a project, capturing video from World of Warcraft at my native monitor/play resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p LCD).

At the moment I'm running a single core CPU, so fraps will not be able to capture this at the desired resolution (I have a CPU on order that should arrive within the week)

So now, I've got a 4 gig raw movie file roughly 10 minutes long.

I've been able to use sony vegas to import/export without any issues, however I would much rather use Premiere as I am more comfortable with the layout of the application.

I've opened my raw movie file in premiere, added music, transitions etc.

... First question

When I start my project in Premiere the resolution I specify for my project, this will be the resolution that my project is exported as? or the resolution of the imported clips? example: I want my final movie to be 1280x1024, but the video I am importing to use is 1600x1200. Should my project be 1600x1200 or 1280x1024?

... Secondly

If me (on a widescreen lcd) watches a non-widescreen movie, I usually see the black border around the movie (to compensate for non-widescreen). If I am creating a widescreen movie, and someone WITHOUT widescreen watches it, do parts of the movie get cut off? or is it just resized to fit their screen?

... and finally lastly

I have tried encoding using all codecs in premiere and I am very dissapointed with how they have turned out. I have read it is best to export to uncompressed and use VirtualDub to compress.

I've done that. I've saved my movie as uncompressed, used virtualdub xvid encoding, 2pass encoding, 1st pass (saved data/high quality), 2nd pass (3000bitrate)

This saves to Xvid compatible movie, small in size, great quality, however every time I attempt to upload it to stage6, I am greeted by a message saying that the movie is uncompatible and to use dr.divx to encode. (I've tried Dr.Divx and I cannot stand using it, not to mention the output movie has no sound)

What am I doing wrong that I cannot upload to stage6 via xvid compression?

When I use sony vegas to export with the DivX codec the movies come out looking great and I can upload it however I would much rather do this with Premiere and Xvid instead.

I've spent the last 3 days searching the internet for help with this to no luck so any help would be Greatly appreciated.


Thanks guys.


edit::

I am unable to create an acceptable stage6 .avi file using virtualdub with divx as well as xvid now.