I have a Pentium4 1.7Mz with 1Gb RAM and an external 200Gb Maxor HDD with a
firewire connection, all with WindowsXPpro.

I have started downloading TV movies with a tuner card and I save these to
the HDD and a movie takes up typically about 5Gb disk space.

I have just started using MovieMaker to trim the ends of the movie and to
chop out the ads.

After I import the movie into Moviemaker I get a whole lot of thumbnails in
a pane some of which I delete as appropriate, but I need a finer selection
of these to chop out the ads which are very frequent. How do I get still
more thumnails for a finer selection of deletable frames?

Also when I have edited the movie as above, I save the file back to the hard
disk, and to my alarm this takes about 3 hours which is a very long time
indeed, especially when importing the move this took only 30 minutes! Am
I doing something wrong here?

Also what settings should I use in saving the movie for the best subsequent
DVD video burning (via Nero6) on a PAL system, especially if I want the
maximum correct lip sync?

Strangely too, when I have processed (via Moviemaker) the 5Gb movie, the
subsequent edited movie when saved back to the HDD takes up only 1.5Gb!
Where did the other Gbs go?

(I don't use Nero6 for editing because it is very unreliable and freezes up
and seems to lose bits of the ends of the movies spontaneously.)

Can someone help me please. Regards Frank