View Full Version : Movie clips on a CD - which format??


Bjørn Sørensen
January 29th, 2004, 06:04 AM
A customer asks me to make a CD (not DVD) that contains various file formats (TIF's, PDF's, JPG's) and 3 movies (10 minuts each - Size: appx 540x432 px)

The movies should play on a regular PC / Mac and in many countries, including USA, Germany and other european countries.

How would you make these movie files (Which filetype?)

My original movie is a PAL FinalCut project.

David Hurdon
January 29th, 2004, 08:05 AM
You'll likely get various opinions (what it's all about, eh?) but mine is MPEG-1. It's MAC/PC friendly and a well-oiled path for CD video. I would also consider an HTML framework, although I admit to too little experience with MACs regarding opening a browser of choice. I have sent such disks to a MAC house without any report of problems. In this format you can hot link all the file types within a "web page"-like presentation.

David Hurdon

Lester DeLeon
January 29th, 2004, 10:04 PM
Not to discourage you, but we have tackled this subject successfully. We have actually done a press release/advertising CD-ROM for a carpeting company. They included PDFs, JPEGs, and video. For video I like using 320x240 MPEG1, 1500 kbps video, and 192 kbps audio. You can use PAL standards if you wish, the computer doesnt really care, unlike TVs and VCRs/DVD players. The hard part is authoring the CD-ROM so that it is windows/mac compatible, and also covers all operating systems in windows & mac.
The solution is Macromedia Director & Flash, along with a bunch of other plug-ins that allow you to open up documents, and play video through director. The CD-ROM will be self playing, and we design the entire interface & layout.
This is some real high end work, but we do charge quite a bit for it. By the way, we have engineering & programming backgrounds, so we picked up director language without any training courses.

Thea cheap solution is to just put the files on the CD-ROM and let the person look for them. HTML is just asking for browser compatibility problems, we tried this on our first attempt.