Like many other production artists, I work on Macs. Most office-related employees, such as account managers, work on Windows-running PCs. When is comes to exchanging documents between these platforms (and Unix computers), many things have become much easier than it was about six or more years ago. For example, fonts have turned a major corner over the last few years with the entrance of OpenType formatted fonts (.otf). The same OpenType font can function the same on any platform you use your document.
One Arena Remaining
Alas, the same is not true for video files however. For the most part, the video world is a morass of choices to make, like going into an ice cream shop with hundreds of flavors. I'm not talking about the web, of course. Most web videos, such as go on YouTube or into a web movie preview site, are translated via a Flash player or some QuickTime format. But when you want to have a video file say, saved from iMovie, play on a Windows PC in a specific program, like PowerPoint, then you may run into unscalable walls.
I have worked at previous companies that had some video production software and hardware that helped out in this regard. I’ve worked with Final Cut Express and related programs. With those, the translation to other video formats is a lot easier. But where I am working now, there is not much to work with except iMovie, QuickTime, Flash, iMovie HD and Adobe Media Encoder.
There are a number of video file formats available that most people are familiar with, but also dozens more. There’s QuickTime (.mov), Windows Media (.wmv), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), MPEG, or Moving Picture Experts Group (.mpg), DivX-Encoded Movie File (.divx), and so forth. For a comprehensive list this FileInfo page is good.
File formats for video, however, are only containers for the content. What’s more important are the languages used to translate that content from the file to the player. These are called codecs. Codec stands for COMpression and DECompression language. A video file natively is really big. Think of hundreds of pictures put together in a sequence, with each picture a certain resolution and dimension. Just one frame from an HD 720p video frame is 2.64 megabytes. Just a short minute of video that size could be almost two or more gigabytes!
So understandably to store and transfer video, we need these codecs to shrink the size of the video files. And when we play it, we need this codec to decompress it on the fly and send each frame to the player in time. Some codecs do this efficiently and some not so much. And the older the codec, the probability is that it degrades the original video a lot, or doesn’t compress it very much.
All this is enough to understand why I had the worst time trying to get a video file saved out of iMovie to play in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 on a Windows PC. It would seem that there are many codecs for Windows Media files (.wmv) that are not accepted by PowerPoint. Now I am pretty sure that MS PowerPoint must use the system media capabilities rather than its own. I figured we needed a conversion capability to go into a Windows Media format. At the time, I only knew about Flip4Mac, which can play WMV files. A paid upgrade will allow some saving into WMV format. I soon would find out that it must take a lot more than just any WMV file to play on PowerPoint.
Flip Over This
My first impasse was with Flip4Mac. I got approval to spend the $39 to upgrade to the first level of capability for Flip4Mac to save out to WMV format on a Mac. I found quickly that $39 (plus tax) is not enough. For that price, you get a maximum of 640 pixels wide and only one pass VBR (Variable Bit Rate encoding). And the resulting quality is horrible. Not only that, but it isn’t available out of iMovie ’09. In fact, it isn’t available through QuickTime directly unless you wish to spend another $30 for QuickTime Pro. I only found the capability via iMovie HD’s Share menu. (To upgrade fully to all the WMV options you could need, please pay an additional $130 to the makers of Flip4Mac.)
What was even more disheartening was that the resultant WMV file would not play in MS PowerPoint on the PC. It played in Windows Media Player, however. Now if it is made by Microsoft, and it plays in one application they make, but not in this other one, what is the problem? Why wouldn’t Microsoft make all their applications compatible with what they work with, across the same platform, which they are owners of as well? Further trials to AVI and other formats did not help either.
Some Other Options
In the process, I found a couple of web sites that offer conversion of video and audio files to various formats. They are in beta version, and offer their services free to start. If you wish to have storage space or other features, you need to pay monthly fees that vary with the options available. One site is called Zamzar, which I liked because the quality of their conversion is very good. However, they use a DIVx codec, so video from there did not play in PowerPoint on a PC for me.
I tried getting QuickTime installed a PC to test whether QuickTime movies would play in PowerPoint on the PC. Nope. (Is there some issue with a PC and video of which I may be unaware? Possibly.) All I got was a black box where the video should have been on the slide.
The Answer
Well, after a few more well-considered options, and finding no solution, I decided to go a route I was pretty sure would work. Each of the PCs that were going to run this presentation had an up-to-date installation of Adobe Reader, version 8, 9 or X. And that meant one thing for video: Flash Video, or .flv format.
Over the last few years Adobe has been working on the problem of video compatibility. Since there seemed to be no progress between Windows Media on the PC and QuickTime on the Macintosh, the programmers at Adobe went ahead and made their own media format to run cross-platform without depending on the operating system’s video rendering engine. They came up with Flash Video format. This works now inside Adobe Acrobat, Flash and other Adobe programs.
So, to make this easy to end, I converted the QuickTimes from iMovie to FLV via Adobe Media Encoder. Then I saved out the PowerPoint presentation as a PDF, sans the videos. Then in Acrobat I placed the videos, set up the transitions to auto flip based on the rehearsed times from the PowerPoint presentation. And now everything in this project functions just fine on PC and on Mac. And that’s all I was asking for.
