[Cindy Towsley]

You sir are a freakin’ genius!!!

[Cindy Towsley]

This is a great utility, I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now.

But, it’s a little out of date. Does anyone know of something similar that’s more current? I often receive client files (like today) where a simple edit is required, and knowing what compression was used on the original file would speed up the rendering process/take out some guesswork on my part.

[Cindy Towsley]

I am in a similar situation to the OP, I work in Live Events. I get what he’s trying to do — make a full resolution wmv file that runs smoothly — no codecs, no lower fields first, no scanlines. Essentially a movie that runs off of a computer, not sent to tape/disc.

This is usually done through a system like Watchout by Dataton (which will take Quicktime files, BTW) https://www.dataton.com/watchout or Spyder by Vista Systems https://www.vistasystems.net/ that takes one extremely large source file and splits it up into several feeds to an equal number of projectors to fill the area. If you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth or just about any high-end production on TV where there’s a huge video playing in the background, chances are it’s running off of one of these systems.

Anyway, I came here because I am having the same problem, I can’t render out a wmv size-as, the AE WMV codec shrinks it. I checked several times, and there’s no setting in the codec tabs to specify width, just framerates/bitrates so I was annoyed and amazed that it was choosing a smaller file size for me arbitrarily.

I had a hunch that 1920 was the absolute width you could make one, so it’s interesting to see that some software will let you do 2000. I checked on M$oft’s site and found something that said there was no limit for the size of the file, so I wonder what exactly in the code is causing the issue. Maybe they meant in terms of GB, not width?

My process is this, I render the comp on my Mac from CS3, usually to a quicktime with animation compression. Transfer that to my PC, also running CS3, and re-render the movie file into WMV. Obviously, I would be over the moon if I could just render the thing out from AE to WMV on my Mac, in one simple step.

I have tried doing it using Flip4Mac and exporting it in QT Pro, using their WMV settings, it did export almost size as, it upsized it a little to 2400 (from my 2398 x 720 – for those of you who are wondering at the weirdness of the dimensions, our final pan screen is 10′ tall by 33.3′ wide, depending on whether there will be 4×3 projectors or HD projectors, there will be probably 3 of them set up rear projection to span that width, the software blends the projectors together to create a seamless image). The file will not run smoothly on my computer (hardly surprising) so I’ll have to wait and see when I get to the venue whether or not it’ll run, it’s just a test to see if it’s possible. We did do some tests earlier in the week and found that exporting the file 50% of its size was OK for projection. However, as I’d like to find out whether or not there’s a better way, I’m doing some tests just to see the results.

I am also trying a render at 1920×1080, which is also the size of the card that the computer will have (don’t know any specs on those, they’re provided by the staging company), just to see if it makes a difference. And, I downloaded the free trial of Flip4Mac’s Episode encoder, which so far seems much easier to use than CleanerXL to see what that’ll give me. If/when I get some definitive answers, I’ll come back with an update.

And just one more thing about the whole Mac/PC thing… in my line of work it boils down to this: businesses use PCs, businesses make PowerPoint files on PCs, having Macs backstage makes Business People uneasy, PowerPoint is not cross platform, 99% of all rental computers for staging are PC. Therefore: all movie files must be in some format that a PC will use, especially if it’s going to run out of PowerPoint. Office hasn’t supported Quicktime since version 3 (I believe), and why would they bother now that they have WMV? So, as much as I would love to use a Quicktime with Sorenson3, I can’t, which is a shame because it works perfectly without all this conversion circus.

[Cindy Towsley]

I was also trying to do a project that needed this ribbon effect in 7 on my Mac and it wasn’t working. The 7.01 update didn’t fix the problem. So I took the old Echo plugin from 6.5, copied it in, removed the new one from the folder — that fixed it and now it works! *whew*