[Godfrey Gudeski]

Thank you all for your responses. I just wanted to post my ultimate solution to this problem in the event that it can help anyone else. I know I often stumble on threads like this years after they’ve been written and find them helpful.

So:

I looked at Digital Anarchy’s Data Animator. It was a bit clunky for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it doesn’t work with FCP or with an Intel Mac so I had to use it on my Windows box (which is considerably slower) with Adobe AE. Also, the interface wasn’t very intuitive and the support was rather slow (it took a few days to get an email response to a basic question). They did say they would be integrating FCP and Intel capability “within a few months” but frankly I’m not convinced; they apparently hadn’t updated the download page in two years.

Next I tried iWork’s Keynote and also Powerpoint. Both are fine, but they lacked mobility I was looking for (camera movement, animated movement within the chart). It looked fine for a presentation at a convention, but not very cinematic.

Then I looked into Stagetools’ program Moving Charts. This was a bit closer to what I wanted, but it’s a Windows-only product and the resolution isn’t quite up to the 1920 width I need for this project; the max would probably end up being about 1000 pixels in width. The guy at Stagetools (very responsive, by the way) said it wasn’t a product they support with any real enthusiasm, that it never really “took off”.

So I bit the bullet and paid for Boris Red. This program is as spectacular as its high price suggests. As someone who hasn’t really worked in a 3D environment much, the learning curve promises to be tremendous. But I’m already hooked on the powerful features this program offers, including a bar chart preset, which makes things much easier.

Thanks to all who took the time to answer my post; I appreciate it!

[Godfrey Gudeski]

Again, thanks for your insight.

I tried exporting to Quicktime with the “animation” setting (under “compressor”). The result was similar to the .wmv file: very good but still showing a slight loss of clarity.

I have literally tried every setting in Premiere, including the encoding options in Adobe Encoder. Nothing seems to retain the original quality and I’m wondering if it’s even possible to do so since my source is itself an mpeg.

What I finally did was run the source file itself through Cleaner, using the elementary color and brightness controls to make the clip look somewhat okay. This has resulted in the best looking clip thus far. But it’s still annoying that I can’t get a completely lossless export because that means I can’t actually cut the clips together into a reel.

Anyway, thanks again for the help.

[Godfrey Gudeski]

Thank you very much for your insight. I have done what you recommended and it did indeed make a difference. I think the reason that escaped me is that any videos I exported under those specs before didn’t play in my VideoLan player (which up until now seemed to play any file I threw at it). But it does play (jerkily) in Media Player and once I encode the file to WMV in Cleaner it looks and plays okay.

It’s still not quite up to the source clip’s quality, though: do you think this could have something to do with the change in frame size? As I said the source clip is 352 x 240 but the clip exported from Premiere is 720 x 480. If I try to plug in the original frame size it turns out looking really bad, so the default seems like the only way to go. Do you think this is causing the slight decrease in quality?

By the way, thanks for all your help. I’ve never used the Cow before and I am flabbergasted at the level of helpfulness I see here. It is very much appreciated.