[ccp4bb]: SUMMARY: Movies and PowerPoint, again

["Wulf Blankenfeldt" <wb6@st-andrews.ac.uk>]

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Dear all,

thank you all very much for the wealth of replies to my question considering
avi-movies in PowerPoint. I'd like to give a summary here; it might be a bit
lengthy but hopefully of some use.


This is from where I started:

Bobscript --> PovRAY --> mediaconvert (SGI; avi-movie) --> PowerPoint
(win2000)


I mainly used this approach because I knew what I was doing with the images
(having used Bobscript through Lothar Esser's fantastic gl_render-interface
for years) and because I could not find any other free software to make
avi-files on our machines. I did not want to use gif-files because my first
attempt on this produced a rather-unpleasant-quality output in the first
place. There are maybe much better ways in making and presenting movies (see
below) but I was also a bit late for getting my act together and I did not
want to dive too much into new programs (yes, I RTFM).



My questions were:


1.) Resolution of movies in Powerpoint:

When I put my first-ever movie on that PowerPoint slide the quality of the
thing changed to awful as soon as I started playing. Many people have
reported the same problem. With avi-files there seems to be no other
solution than formatting the movie to much less than 100 % size. I used 50 %
as a rule of thumb. If you actually look at the options in Format
Picture --> Size in Powerpoint you'll find an entry "Best scale for slide
show", which makes the size dependent of screen resolution, and I think this
is where the problem comes in. The good news here is that you can render
your frames without anti-aliasing etc (much faster in PovRAY) as it will not
make any difference to the quality of your movie.
Another factor changing the ability of your computer to play these movies is
the place were you actually have your files: PowerPoint only saves links to
the file in the presentation, not the file itself (very nice if you have
transferred your file to the lecture theatre and suddenly find out that your
movie is not playing because you loaded it through a network drive). So: put
them on your harddrive, otherwise they might not play smoothly if network
traffic is high.....


2.) Number of images per second:

There seems to be an easy answer to this question: Don't bother if you use
avi-files produced with mediaconvert. PowerPoint will always play them at 30
frames per second no matter what you set. This means that a 360 degree
rotation in 1 degree steps will take 12 seconds. I found this to be quite a
nice speed for protein ribbons, but the avi-files are really monstrous, even
with after compression (I used cinepac 0.99 in mediaconvert).



Other approaches:

Warren DeLano
is certainly right to point me to PyMol for making movies easily
(http://www.pymol.org), but it just didn't want to read my bobscript
...r3d-file straight away so I did not take the time to learn how to use this
program. Next time.

Charlie Bond
suggests to not use PowerPoint altogether and show your slides through
Netscape. He pointed me to a little program that can make the browser occupy
the whole screen without bars: http://www.inquare.com/fs/index.phtml

Scott White
is another non-PowerPoint specialist. He suggests using the Acrobat-reader
instead. This sounds very elegant given the portability of PDF-files. I did
never know they would also carry animated stuff.


The other suggestions I got mainly consider different programs to produce
and stitch images together (Molray, makemovie, imagemagick, Adobe photoshop
& illustrator, gifmoviegear, gifsicle etc.) which I am sure are all quite
self-explanatory things.


Hope this is of any use,




Wulf




___________________________
Dr. Wulf Blankenfeldt

Structural Biology Group
Biomolecular Sciences Building
University of St. Andrews

North Haugh
St. Andrews, Fife
KY16 9ST
UK

Tel:    +44 (0) 13 34 - 46 72 82
Fax:    +44 (0) 13 34 - 46 25 95
e-mail: wb6@st-andrews.ac.uk