Movie Saves Without Visuals

[ristretto6]

So I just finished making a movie in Microsoft Movie Maker. I have video and
overlaid audio tracks (the original audio from the video clips is muted).
When I play back the video in Movie Maker, it looks fine (although it doesn't
run smoothly--it lags as if the computer is low on memory, and does this more
so for the frames that are sped up to double-speed).

However, when I click "save movie file" and save it to my computer, it
creates a file that, when played, shows the title slides that I have
interspersed throughout the movie, and plays the audio that I have inserted,
but doesn't show any of the video itself. what is going wrong here?

Thanks,
-lindsey

 

[ristretto6]

Okay, so it seems clear that I need to be saving in AVI, but my file seems to
be too large and unwieldy for my computer to handle this. When I try to save
the file as AVI it freezes about 45 minutes into the save. So I tried
breaking it up into smaller chunks, and in fact when I save the movie in
2-minute segments, the resulting AVI file looks great, but then I have to
deal with the blackout at the beginning of each video clip, so clearly I
won't be able to just string these separate AVI clips together and see them
play as one continuous movie.

Also, since I'm manually cutting it into smaller AVI files, I don't know for
sure that I'm able to splice them together perfectly--there doesn't seem to
be any way to say "cut my file at the 2:00 mark and delete everything after
(or before) that point" so that I can be sure they splice together properly;
it seems like instead, I have to decide which clip to end the chunk after and
do it all manually, which is insanely tedious.

How do I go about either making it so it won't freeze when it saves the AVI
file in its original entire piece, or how do I confidently break it into
smaller chunks?
Thanks.