Best Flip4Mac WMV settings…

[David Roth weiss]

Whoa, why exactly are you exporting to WMV for PPT? That seems way illogical to me.

[Ron Dylewski]

David –

I am doing this because that’s what the client wants. Trust me, this is not
my idea and we have tried to change his mind, but he is a Windoz guy and will
not budge.

sigh…

Ron

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[David Roth weiss]

I can dig… I work with so many people who don’t get any of this stuff. Its can be so frustrating. Instead of asking me how to do it peoperly, they tell me how to do it wrong, and they demand I do it wrong.

[Ron Dylewski]

Yup! They are very sure of how not to do it!

Though I will commiserate with clients. It’s very confusing. I yearn for the “gimme a VHS” days. Now everyone wants 14 versions of every project in different formats. Then there are the inevitable calls from clients saying , “I can’t play it on my computer…” Yea, I have time for that!

Cheers!

Ron

Photos, news, memories and musings on the great American Roadside experience
https://www.theamericanroadside.com

Are you a collector? Put your collection online for free at What A Collection.com!
https://www.whatacollection.com

[Craig Seeman]

You may need to know what your client’s computer can handle. I’d do 2 Pass VBR and a data rate of between 2000 and 4000 kbps if his computer is reasonably fast. You could push it more if you have to but again it depends on your clients horse power.

[Johnw3d]

2 to 4mbps for 640×480 video is pretty high in WM9, that’s getting up in the 720p range, but if you can afford the bandwidth, it should be just about visually lossless. If performance or download time is an issue, you should be able to get good results at 1.5mbps.

I take it this is video, right? Or is it synthetic?

[Rich Rubasch]

WMV is a great video format for PPT since most of them play on PCs anyway and players are loaded on most machines and 640 x 480 can look great and play great in WMV.

But here’s the rub…you WILL NOT get a 640 x 480 clip to look good out of Flip4Mac. It works great on the 320 x 480 stuff (think MPEG-1) but not on the full screen stuff. And remember you will most likely have PPT scale up the clip to fill the screen. I do this all the time so pay attention!

I export an AVI uncompressed file out of FCP and take that via Firewire drive to a PC that has the free WMV encoder. Set it to about 2000mbps and be sure to deinterlace it. Play with the settings a bit, but you will get a fabulous clip that will impress your client.

One last tip…be sure your clips fade in from black and out to black….then, add fades from the outgoing slide to the incoming slide after the clip plays and it will all play very seamlessly during the presentation.

To review, I use Flip4Mac to make quick 320 x 240 WMVs for client approval right off the FCP timeline, but when it comes to full screen WMVs at 640 x 480 I export uncompressed AVIs (yes they are big, but will look great) to a firewire and encode on a PC…deinterlace, 2000mbps or so, multi pass etc and it will look fabulous and play nice on PCs. They will also play using the PPT player app, so users will only need a WMV player on their PC. However, these movies will not play on a Mac.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[David Roth weiss]

I read it wrong. My old editing system used PTT for “Print To Tape”. Yes, WM9 is a good choice for PPT. My bad…

DRW

[Ron Dylewski]

Rich –

Thanks for the detailed info. I had resisted moving this to a PC and using the Windows encoder, thinking it would be faster to stay on my Mac, but, after screwing around for three days with this, I realize that was totally foolish.

I’ll try you suggestions.

Again, thanks for the help. This is exactly what I was after!

Ron
Panta Rhei Media

Photos, news, memories and musings on the great American Roadside experience
https://www.theamericanroadside.com

Are you a collector? Put your collection online for free at What A Collection.com!
https://www.whatacollection.com

[Craig Seeman]

[overeasy] “I had resisted moving this to a PC and using the Windows encoder, thinking it would be faster to stay on my Mac”

Buy a MacBook or iMac and run Parallels.