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 -- .·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´ ° ° ° ° ° ° ><((((º> ° ° ° ° ° <º)))>< <º)))><

Hi Markus, First I'd suggest that the best supported movie format on the Mac is Quicktime, so you should use the Chimera movie command option "mformat mov", or leave the mformat option out since quicktime is the default. As Damir mentioned sometimes movies play on one screen but not a second one when two displays are used at the same time. I haven't seen that on a Mac but have on Linux. I would not expect this to be dependent on the movie format, but it is possible that some formats allow simultaneous display at two screen resolutions while others don't. It would be worth testing some other movie not made in Chimera in powerpoint in the same presentation to see if it is a specific problem to the Chimera movie. To get higher resolution you want to record the movie with a larger Chimera window. If you are going to play the movie full screen in a presentation than you need to record it with a large Chimera window so it does not have to be blown up too much which would make it blocky. The Chimera supersample option is just a way to smooth the appearance -- it doesn't increase the resolution. The movie encoding bit rate also does not increase the resolution -- it simply reduces the artifacts introduced by compression such as halos around objects. Tom