[Chimera-users] ppt and movies

[Damir Perisa]

Thursday 22 November 2007, Markus Voehler wrote:
 | I have recorded a movie of a pdb in chimera with the following
 | command:
 |
 | movie record supersample 3
 | .
 | .
 | movie stop
 | movie encode bitrate 6000 mformat avi output ./pol_b_movie.avi
 |
 | I can import it into ppt (2004, V 11.3.5)  on my Mac (OS X
 | 10.4.11) and it plays fine in the editing mode, but when I go to
 | the slideshow and start the movie, there is a blank screen for the
 | duration of the movie. When it is done, it shows the standing
 | slide again. Any idea what might be going on?
 | Also, is there a better way to improve the resolution then setting
 | the bitrate to 6000, 30 f/s? I have tried the supersample 3
 | option, but this does not seem to make much of a difference in the
 | final movie.
 |
 | Any input is appreciated.
 |
 | Markus

hi Markus,

regarding the black screen: is it during presentation (on the external 
screen) or on the screen of the laptop? in dualhead-mode (two 
screens - i.e. beamer + internal panel) depending on your system you 
can get movies to work only on one, the main screen.

about the quality loss:
my guess is that the quality loss happens in the compression (mformat 
avi i do not like).

i would suggest the following:

* "encode" your movie in mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 ("DVD"-settings) in chimera 
(results in a quite big file, no loss in compression hopefully) and 
save it somewhere.

* then, use ffmpeg [1] (how to get it to work on OS-X see [3] - i use 
linux, so i am not much help there) to convert it in a format you 
like/need - in the commandline do:

 ffmpeg -b 400 -qmin 3 -qmax 10 -i chimera-generated.mpg output.mov

the default of ffmpeg is mpeg4 and i would suggest to put it in a 
Quicktime/MOV container. on OS-X with installed quicktime, powerpoint 
can handle this. but you can also use the avi container:

just add "-f avi -vcodec mpeg4"  to the parameters:

 ffmpeg -b 400 -qmin 3 -qmax 10 -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -i 
chimera-generated.mpg output.mov

for details see [2], to find out what codecs and file formats you can 
use on your system run "ffmpeg -formats" and check the list (may be a 
long list).

some windows machines do not like quicktime formats. then you can put 
it in another container - you can also use avi, no problem. with 
ffmpeg you can finetune the quality settings for encoding.

an additional remark: use as big size of the movie as you can while 
generating ("resolution") because later, you can always make it 
smaller and the bigger the picture the better the quality in showing 
it fullscreen.

hope it is some help, 

greetings,

Damir

[1] : http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
[2] : http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html
[3] : http://stephenjungels.com/jungels.net/articles/ffmpeg-howto.html

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