v arious problems

[lloyds]

After 18 months and hundreds of hours of preparation, interviews, etc., 
I'm finally editing a community video in FCE. Some accumulated problems 
I'd really welcome help on:

1. Some interviews, with multiple people, were recorded with a boundary 
mike which produces mono sound on one track only. They sound weak when I 
project them, since they come from only one speaker. Is there any way to 
get that sound onto the second stereo track, so we keep stereo sound 
throughout? I tried copy and paste one track onto the other in the time 
line, but it doesn't work. I have a couple of sound editing programs 
(Peak and Amadeus II), but I haven't used them much, nor do I know how 
to connect them to FCE sound track. Can you help me with this?

2. When fading between scenes of the same still shot to successively 
brighter levels, during the fade the level goes up to beyond the level 
of second scene than drops back down (in a fraction of a second). Is 
there any way to get a smooth ramp up to the second level, with no drop 
back? I've explored the cross fade control windows with no success. I 
finally used a dithered cross fade which makes the drop back less 
obvious, but I'd prefer a straight, smooth cross fade.

3. In some interviews, the light level fades in and out, I'm guessing 
because of some auto level response on the camcorder which I didn't 
notice at the time. Can this be corrected in the editing process?

4. Some of the sound bites start abruptly (in order to get rid of 
previous sound fragments). Can I add a space of silence before the sound 
starts? How? Is there a way to fake ambient sound?

6. The quality of some of the still shots (from slides), which look fine 
on the computer monitor, look lousy on the video monitor. But some of 
them look terrific, which baffles me. I have struggled with taking them 
into and out of Photoshop with no consistent results. Most of them have 
been processed by PhotoWorks, who send them back on disc in three 
different resolutions -- 384x256 pixels, 768x512 pixels and 1536x1024 
pixels. I have been using the middle range, which seems to offer the 
best results, but still often not great on the video monitor. How can I 
improve the quality of the poor ones -- which look just fine on the 
computer monitor in FCE and Photoshop? They are all jpeg images. Is 
there some standard procedure for maximizing the quality of slides 
inserted into a FCE? This is a big problem for me because the slides are 
a very important part of the message of this project. It's hard to 
believe that with all this magical electronic equipment, something 
better can'tbe made to happen.

If I make a tape and play it through a TV set, the images look a little 
bit better, but the landscapes still look pretty flat and pixellated (is 
that a word?). What is going to happen if I try to publish on VHS?

TIA

BobLL