"Peter Duniho" wrote in message
...
"Jay Beckman" wrote in message
news
rant
What is it with the urge for people to convert pictures and video to
formats other than what they were taken in? What's wrong with JPG?

JPG is a "lossy" format. Each time the file is re-saved, it
re-compresses and information is lost.

Except that it's likely that the original images were already JPEGs, which
someone stuffed into a .ppt file. They could've just provided the
original files instead.

Or converted it to a more uniformly supported video file, if they really
wanted to have control over soundtrack and image transitions.

For that matter, even something like Flash would be better than
PowerPoint, and allows exactly the same benefits (such as they are). I'm
with Skywise...PowerPoint is a downright silly format to distribute online
media content.

Agreed.


or AVI?

AVI is relatively UNcompressed and can take up a lot of space. IIRC,
AVIs take up about 13Gb per hour.

You misunderstand AVI. AVI is just a container. An AVI that uses 12GB
(not 13GB) per hour is in the NTSC-DV format. That is, the raw (mostly)
digital stream that comes off a digital video camera.

AVI can also contain MPEG4, WMV, DivX, etc. all of which compress very
nicely and don't come close to 12GB/hour.


Ok, noted. I've only worked with video that has been transferred straight
off tape. I've not ever heard of AVI as a "wrapper" for other formats.

or MOV?

Proprietary.

And PowerPoint isn't?

No, you're right, it is as well.

You may find it interesting that AVID (arguably the most widely used
professional video editing platform) encodes material into Quicktime
files.

I'm sure some of their tools use Quicktime for certain things. What that
has to do with this discussion, I don't see.

It's the one file format that didn't get mentioned...and I'm pretty sure
most people don't equate Quicktime with pro-level work.

I just tossed that out as an "oh by the way."

Jay B