> Thanks to the poewrful software I was able to create some protein > animations using Python. As a mac user I have the option to save > directly the animation for quick time player. From the options I have > upom save, I tried 'movie' and 'animation' and both formats show a > reduced performance when the files are launched from PowerPoint. Since
Well, using MPEG encoding on a PC I've found that a normal 25fps framerate can involve too much data for PowerPoint to handle, thanks to some idiotic "feature" used to scale movies in presentation mode. In the past, I've been able to fix this occasionally using smaller movies, or using a reduced framerate. I found that 20fps was quite reasonable and the computer didn't choke. (Oddly, I was using lower compression and the bitrate was actually higher with the slower movies!) Personally, I've found MPEGs to be extremely portable and (to the extent that anything does) they work well in PowerPoint. You just need to fiddle with the compression and framerate settings to get something high-quality that won't hiccup in presentations. Either Windows Media or Quicktime can produce better movies but I think this involves more advanced codecs and you lose quite a bit of portability. You should have the same control over compression ratio and framerate, though. Has anyone used Keynote for anything like this, by the way?
