First of all, hello there. I'm new around here, and I was looking for some help on video creation,mostly technical advice, yet this does not mean I am a newbie in movie editing.

I usually go for after effect and premiere for my editing. I've been using
premiere 6.5 for quite some time with good results, but I've upgraded to premiere pro a few days ago and got amazed at the possibilties of that program. However, I got one issue that I can't really fix, and I was hoping one of you guys could help me out. Thanks in advance

Here's the deal:
I have started a new sequence with a standart size of 720x576. Then I imported some video captured from an old Hi-8 camcorder sized 352x288. Now i did all my video edition, and when I went to export the movie in AVI, I got this huge blackbox around a tiny video, meaning that the actual footage wasn't resized (not to mention that I got a hell of a lot of flicker, prolly from using the DIVX 5 codec). Now when I resized video in 6.5 all videos woud constrain to 720x576 (the size that I desire for my video), so how come that doesn't happen in Pro? I know I must probably resize the sequence or clips but I can't locate the button to do it. plus I can't change the projects settings while editing..

Any help would be greatly apreciated. thanks in advance.

In P Pro there are two effects which are fixed, ie they won't be found in the effects folder, they are already applied to each track. One of these (may be called "motion", I'm not sure) includes a value for size. So if you look at the effects for each clip, one of them will include a a value for size which you can alter either via a mouse or by typing in the size.

If you do this to one clip and then right click that clip and select "copy" and then select all the other clips that you want to increase in the same way and right click and select "paste attributes" it will paste the same effect onto all the slected clips (I don't know, offhand, however, if it will overwrite any other effects you may have on these clips).

With still pictures there is an option that you can set to "resize to fit" but I don't know if this applies to video too or not.

The best way to do it although you will lose quality using a hi8 is to go to PROJECT MENU > PROJECT SETTINGS> then at the bottom of the video section there is a small box that says scale all clips to to project dimensions when adding to sequence.

hope this helps