Hi all,
I work in a holistic health care office that is a training institute in addition to providing clinical services. We are putting together PowerPoint presentations for training and for presentations at conference. We’re all relatively new to the process, and none of us has much experience with digital video. We do, however, have general competence w/computers.
The person working with the original digital video files is on a Mac. She has been converting them to Quicktime .mov files, or burning them to a DVD as .vob files. Windows PowerPoint, of course, doesn’t like .mov files, so I’m looking for an optimal video format for us to use.
I’ve tried converting a .vob file to either .mpg (mpeg-1 — mpeg-2 files wouldn’t play in PPT) or .wmv files. When I play either of those file formats in Windows Media Player, they’re small, but very crisp and clean. When I insert them into PPT 2003, though (via Insert > Movies and Sounds > Movie from File, which is the only way I seem to be able to bring them in) they play back larger, and look a little fuzzy. and somehow seem to have degraded from how they appeared on the Mac where the conversion was done – they will stutter a little, or pick up some distortion, or alter in some way.
I’m using a little utility called WinAVI Video Converter for conversion on my end (on a WinXP PC). When I created the .mpg files I set the conversion options to give me the best quality, and to keep the keep the original picture size. But the original picture plays larger on the Mac than it does on the PC. Does most conversion software yield about the same quality output, or do I need to shop around for a better utility to convert the video? Is there any way to get a larger picture in PPT but have it look crisp and clean the way it does in Windows Media Player?
I’d love to find some kind of resource to guide the process from beginning to end. My head is dizzy with codecs and file formats, and there’s so much information on the Internet that Googling keywords is just making things worse 
Thanks in advance for any info you can provide!
Merry
. There is a maximum upload size but I think you should be OK.
