Smaller Video Size and Determining Video Size of Found Video Clips

Q. When downloading clips from the internet, what size is appropriate to use for our video editing project? And how do we find out what size the video is that we've downloaded?

A. 320 x 240 is the standard size for smaller videos. This is the size of the stock videos we have. I've been using some of these in my larger format, and they look okay, but I've been using them mostly as background transparencies.

If you are looking at a quicktime movie, for example, you can open up the video, then go to the WINDOW pulldown menu, and select SHOW MOVIE INFO. The size is listed near the bottom of the list.

Unfortunately I don't see this option in Windows Media - I would first of all change any .wmv into .mpg, simply by changing the file extension name (not putting it through a conversion program, just change the last three letters of the file name), then open it in Premiere and go to the CLIP pull down menu, and select PROPERTIES. You can also open mpgs in Premiere and do the same to find out the size of the video.