Re: [ccp4bb]: PowerPoint

[Brooks Mark <brooks@embl-grenoble.fr>]

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Anastassis Perrakis wrote:

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>
> > Making movies:
> >
>
> VideoMach is a not-great-but-good-enough tool for assembling together
> other movie files, gif files, animated gif files or whatever and
> outputing a descent variety of formats. It has a free 30 day trial
> and a single copy costs 50$. If you really find the 50$ too much you can
> reinstall every 30 days ... but that is a 50$ well spend !
>
> http://www.gromada.com/
>
> How to get the 'frames' I guess it will always be a matter of taste.
> We mostly use Bobscript/Raster3d to get RGB files, then ImageMagick
> (freeware) to get an animated GIF (you can preview that in Netscape).

To get the initial frames, I aggree; use a script- as discussed previously.

Then you can edit the frames with the Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/.  Its
free, works great under unixes/linux, but a bit buggy still under Windows I
find.)
Go to Layers/Channels and you can do things like edit the time interval
between frames, copy frames to clone them and overlay with a new molecule
which may appear on the scene etc.

Gimp 1.2 has an animation playback part to it as well, so you can step
though the animation frame by frame and see where any problems may arise.
(Right click on the image>Filters>Animation>Animation Playback)

>
> Then I ftp the GIF in my notebook and convert it to
> mpeg or avi with VideoMach.
>
> Note that PowerPoint 2000 will play animated GIFs but it is truly
> patheticaly slow. The same gif in the same computer plays great using
> Netscape though ... yet another example of enlighted programming from
>

Try "StarOffice" http://www.sun.com/  This works fine for animated gifs,
and ran through the image faster than I could talk about it last time  ;-).

> Microsoft. Talking about it, in PowerPoint when you import a movie or an
> animated GIF it shows in 'true' resolution while editing (ie a 'file'
> pixel takes a 'screen' pixel) and when going to 'full
> screen'/'presentation' mode it scales it up (ie resamples the image with
> osme short of undocumented dithering technique), which most of the time
> goes unnoticed but in fact makes the image quality a bit worse. Does
> anybody know a trick (other than not to use PowerPoint) to ovecome this?
>

                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                You answered this yourself really, didn't
you?
Mark

>
>                 Tassos

--
Mark Brooks,
EMBL Grenoble Outstation,
6, rue Jules Horowitz, BP181
38042 Grenoble Cedex 9, France.
Tel: + (0)4 76 20 72 85