[Ed Dooley]

All good encoders. You may have trouble exporting from FCP with Procoder though (PC only) 🙂
Ed

[edwige_7] “I try to find a tool to export files in MPEG 2 from final cot pro. The problem is I have to encode specific size of movie (like 896×896 or 1248×624).
Autodesk cleaner XL make only standard size, compressor also. It has to be in a MPEG2. “

[Ed Dooley]

DO A SEARCH! There are tons of postings about this all over the COW. Here’s a couple, but c’mon
just type “connect TV to computer” and you’ll see, um, A TON!
Ed

https://www.matrox.com/video/products/rtx100xtremepro/home.cfm

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=8&postid=882641

[Ed Dooley]

1- Plug it right in to the monitor port. Yes.
2- Get a Bluetooth keyboard for the easiest setup
3- No, yes, maybe. It all depends on what kind of stuff you’ll be doing on it. Serious editing, get plenty of RAM and good speakers, for example.
Ed

[Scott Davis] “1-How do you hook up a regular sized monitor? Also, can you run a dual monitor set up with a laptop ?
2-How do you hook up a keyboard?
3-Are there anyconsiderations I should take into account, or is it like using a little desktop?”

[Ed Dooley]

And it’s a freebie directly from Microsoft now. https://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/flip4mac.mspx
Ed

[Craig Seeman] “Flip4Mac also has a player component that allow you to play WMV in Quicktime (that’s free) and can wrap WMV in MOV for editing purposes.”

[Ed Dooley]

Even here in the boonies of Vermont, the cable and DSL providers have gone to multi-mb speeds, but, for example, here in my little ski town
I can’t get my local provider’s fastest services because I’m 5 miles out of town. It’s coming soon they say. Right now I have 1.5mb down and 512kb up.
Unfortunately for me, my phone company owns the cable company too, so there’s no cable, and no possibility of competition.
It’s probably more important to design files for the bogging down. One of my clients, a university, commonly has slower than advertised bandwidth.
All those students pirating music from Limewire I guess. 🙂
Ed (who luckily has most of his clients in other states and countries!)

[Craig Seeman] “In my own area, Cable Modem tends to range from 10mbps to 30mbps download and DSL tends to be 1.5mbps to 3mbps. There might be a few who are at 768kbps. That’s why knowing one’s region is important.”

[Ed Dooley]

OK, now that it’s more complicated. 🙂
Streaming is still misunderstood by a lot of people. True streaming requires a streaming server, but what a lot of folks think of streaming is actually progressive download
from an http server, where the app knows when enough of the video has loaded to start playing automatically. (I know most of you know this, but I’m always suprised at how many don’t) Again it depends on your audience. If you don’t want to pay for a streaming server, you should consider your audience, maybe all you need is progressive download. Even though most of the stuff we compress is viewed by people in corporate or institutional environments with fast internet, we sometimes have to consider clients with less bandwidth. Although we stopped caring about dial-up users some time ago, we still care about slow DSL users, or people with faster internet that may get bogged down to a low rate. So, we often create a 300kbs- 256×192 or 320×240 and a 700kbs-384×288 or 480×360 to
accomodate the lowest common denominator folks. Both those rates will load and play instantly on their respective 384 or 768kbs bandwidth. If it’s for a client with guaranteed higher bandwidth, we custom size the video.
One final note about protecting your video from people downloading it. Windows Media is protected from that easily when you embed the video in your web page and use a WMX file as a pointer to the video instead of linking directly to the WMV file.
Ed

[David Roth Weiss] “At the risk of making this even more complicated, in addition to what everyone else said, with a 5-minute peice you also need to decide if you will stream the video or simply make it available for download. Streaming starts very quickly and protects your video, downloading can take quite a while and it means giving your video away to all. All of the various video formats have different streaming techniques and considerations.”

[Ed Dooley]

What are you looking at the MPEG-2 with? If you’re viewing it on your computer monitor, don’t.
Use a TV/video monitor.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

As said above, it depends on your audience. If you’re unclear about that, it’s always safe to assume that the
majority of viewers will be on PCs (like, um, 97% of computer users), unless it’s a totally hip, arty, creative
crowd. We almost always create a Windows Media version and a QT version for the web, each one optimized
for the different gamma of each platform. We, on occasion, still do an MPEG-1 version for cross-platform
compatibility, but more often these days, we’re doing a WMV, QT, and Flash version. That will cover all bases.
Check out Flip4Mac WMV Studio https://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_upgrades.htm.
It’s a plug-in that allows you to export to Windows Media 9 files right out of QT apps like FCP,
QuickTime Pro, Cleaner, etc.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

What? Why would someone want to create a smaller file and stretch it out? The most suggested method, and by the way it’s all spelled out very clearly in the graphics section of the FCP manual, it’s in the on-line help, and it’s been discussed thousands of times in this forum; that’s a hint that you should do a little search before asking it for the 2,000th time 🙂
If you’re *not* using Photoshop CS1 or later, create a 720×540 graphic to fit a 720×480 video, if it’s a 720×486 video, make it a 720×547 graphic.
It’s really spelled out in detail if you RTFM!
Ed

[Jeff Carpenter] “If that’s NOT an option then they should work on a 640×480 file. Once they’re done they should copy it into a 720×480 file and STRETCH it width-wise to make it fit, edge to edge. That would work too.”

[Ed Dooley]

If you’ll be editing DV25, then an internal 500 gig drive should be fine. There are also kits available from ProMax, Wiebetech, and others to install more drives internally. You can also use a FW800 external drive like the GTech or Lacie. If you’ll be editing anything needing more bandwidth than DV25, I would go with an external SATA RAID (the Burly box, Wiebetech, and others make them) with an eSATA card. Check out barefeats.com or storagereview.com for hard drive reviews and newegg.com for hard drive deals.
HTH,
Ed