Exporting question…

[Dndobson]

That really depends on the speed of the laptop.
Not knowing that, I’d just pick the best settings for a DVD (mpeg2)and burn that to a DVD disk or to a folder and play that on the laptop.

[Chris Knight]

Not sure if this has been fixed in the last year or so, but you generally can NOT play a video on both the laptop monitor and a projector output at the same time (it’s a limitation of DirectShow). I usually have clients turn off the laptop monitor during playback of a presentation. Otherwise, the projector shows a big black square where the video plays.

As for format, I usually use Windows Media, 640×480 (29.97 fps), encoded at 1600kps. If it’s an older laptop, I drop the resolution down to 512×384, and the bitrate down to 1000. If you have sound, keep the audio bitrate @ 128kbit or higher.

[Lex Park]

Cool. I rendered out to .avi at 640×480 (29.97 fps), encoded at 220974 Kbps bitrate and it looks great. It’s 1.8GB in size.
I’m aware of the projector issue with video files and can accomodate accordingly.

My issue now is I can’t find a laptop around here (at work) that will successfully play this file back without “stuttering” or noticeably building the graphic lines and such (there are a lot of motion graphics, animations, moving titles and so forth in this thing).

I’m copying the file to the HD and playing it, but still getting these low-qual results.
I’m guessing it’s the graphics card that’s not able to keep up?

Do you think it would be best to convert/export to mpeg2 and burn to DVD for playback? Would this change the way the graphics card handles it during playback? If I go this route, how much will the vid quality suffer when encoded to mpeg2?

Thanks so much everyone!

– The Foonshoe

[Lex Park]

Tried mpeg2 export, but when played back on pc, there are all these lines present. Looks bad.
I tried mpeg2-DVD… same thing. Only when I check the box to Deinterlace, do the lines go away…

Any suggestions as to how I should export to mpeg2 for optimal playback on PC?

Thanks so much.

– The Foonshoe

[Chris Knight]

You SHOULD de-interlace for PC playback. If you are still experiencing stuttering, then lower the video bitrate (every PC is different, so you should experiment – I’ve always found 1000-1600kbit to be perfectly fine for Windows Media on most laptops). If the stuttering still won’t go away, drop the resolution to 512×384.