Working with a Macphobe

I have a short clip in QT to be played on a Windows machine that doesn't have quicktime on it.
The chap who operates the computer (this is at a church btw) sees no need or "virtue" in loading up any Apple branded software.
What formats will QT Pro export to? Or can anyone recommend any other apps that can convert .mov to other windows compatible formats for under $50.
OR- will Final Cut Pro itself export to PC flavored formats??

thanks
Rick

The "virtue" would be that he could play the nice high quality clip that you provide him with.

Quicktime ain't gonna kill his computer. You can try Flip4Mac. It might be in your price range.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Why not do as YouTube does? Convert Quicktime to Flash. Most every browser has a flash player built it

You could try telling him that the fruit of knowledge that the serpent tempted Eve and Adam with, wasn't ACTUALLY an apple. Apple's aren't all that bad (except Macintosh which are too sweet).

Judge not lest ye be judged.

Andy

Just tell him he's been in league with The beast all along and adding QuickTime purifies its ever-lovin' media soul.

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Toggle your Timeline Filters bar with Option T !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

<<<You could try telling him... >>>

You could try telling him, "Yes, sir." since he's the client, and look who he has on his side.

AVI in the less compressed versions will play on almost any Windows machine. It's the grandfather of Windows Media. AVI compression, however, is pretty awful.

Koz

Yes, go out AVI uncompressed. You can do the conversion in Quicktime. Just open the clip(s) in Quicktime, go to File > Export > Movie to AVI. Then hit the Options button, change the Video Settings to Compressions type : None, frames per sec : best, compressor : Millions of colours, quality : best. Change the settings in the sound for best quality too, then hit OK.

This will make your files up to ten times larger - so here a 200MB file becomes about 2GB, but the quality will be about the same as your original.

If you need to load onto an external drive, remember that drives formatted for PC that can be written to on a Mac can only accept files up to 2GB, so you may have to split the files. This is FAT32 format.

This is a problem which does not seem to be going away soon.

If you are working with people who are in the "Real" world - those who are not fortunate enough to be Mac based, you need to be able to understand their environment. Remember, over 90 percent of the computers out there are not Macs.

The best way to do that is to have a Windows based platform available to prepare, and check your work. You can buy a PC which will do that for under $450.00 new, or $200.00 used. You can also use Boot Camp or Parallels, etc. to run Windows on your Mac.

Please - this is not a slam at Macs - i love my Apple machines (Well, I hate them less than my Windows computers.)

Your friend has good reasons to keep Quicktime/iTunes off computers he is responsible for. -Everytime Apple needs to do an update of iTunes/Quicktime, it means about an extra hour of my time, resetting items on, not only my machines, but my fiance's, and at least two cleints and a couple of "friends" (They're actually voice-over competitors.) who call me, trying to figure out what's wrong with their systems in their home studios. And, this is happening about once-a-month, now - a 120MB download.

Anyway, one way you could take care if this is to create an .avi file, then move that over to your Windows partition (on you Virtual Windows machine) , and encode to .wmv using the "Windows Media Encoder" which is free, from Microsoft.

And, of course, there's Flip4Mac - $49.00 if you don't need HD. And, yes, Flash-8 is close to a perfect solution, if you're willing to do the setup for that.

Another solution is to make a standard DVD - He probably has some sort of method for getting the video off the DVD and into his system - or even simply playing the DVD for his audience.

Travis - Mac/Windows/Linux user

Travis
VoiceOver Guy and Entertainment Technology Enthusiast
[www.VOTalent.com]

Travis, why wouldn't you just give them the .avi?

Thanks for all the input!
I saved the file to at least 4 different formats. When I gave it to him, I asked him to try the mov first since it would probably be the higher quality image.
His 'church presentation software' dropped it right in without a hiccup... as he sat there looking confused.
He tried the others, not wanting to succumb to anything Apple, and had to admit the mov looked better on the screen and that's the one he used.

Again, thanks for the suggestions. I think if I had given him a disk with ONLY the mov, he would not have even tried it.


Rick

Quote
Jude Cotter
Travis, why wouldn't you just give them the .avi?

Years ago, I gave up using .avi as a distribution medium. Things may have changed since then, but I found it very difficult to know which codecs a user had on their system, and the default codecs (Cinepack, Intel, MS) were all low quality or problematic. I Switched to providing both .wmv and .h264.mov, then to Flash 9 .flv.

Rick's discovery that his customer could actually play his .mov files illistrates an important point. There is STILL no standard, reliable, distribution format for quality video. We really need something as universal as .mp3 is for audio.

Travis
VoiceOver Guy and Entertainment Technology Enthusiast
[www.VOTalent.com]

Oh I see. I thought he needed to edit with the files. AVI does suck really, I think I heard that Microsoft stopped supporting it years ago, but it's almost always what PC web guys want me to supply for subtitling and stuff.