How To
use Presenter 3D for Internet graphics and movies
QuickTime is a good way to deliver Presenter 3D animation on the Internet. Apple has developed a plug-in extension to play movies directly in a web browser window. It is available at quicktime.apple.com. Be sure to visit The QuickTime WebMaster's Page for information about QuickTime on the Internet.
Apple has developed a QuickTime extension for MPEG video playback. If your browser has the QuickTime plug-in and the QuickTime MPEG extension, you can see an embedded movie here.
This file size of this movie is 88K. The MPEG compression was set very high, and some loss of quality is evident. But the QuickTime movie that was used as an input was 1.2MB, so this is an acceptable trade-off. The movie was placed in this HTML document with a single line of code:
<EMBED SRC="../../../images/sphereFaces.mpg" WIDTH=240 HEIGHT=180 autoplay=TRUE loop=TRUE controller=FALSE playeveryframe=TRUE pluginpage="http://quicktime.apple.com>
Converting the movie from QuickTime to MPEG was easy with Sparkle 2.4.5. Simply open the movie file, then use the "Save As..." command and select MPEG format. Another window will appear to allow the compression settings to be set. Here is a screen show of the compression settings I've been using. The highlighted area show where the settings were changed from the default values. These values are known to work with Apple's MPEG extension for QuickTime. If the results are unsatisfactory, try lowering the values for the I, P and B frames. The quality will improve, but the file size will increase.
For an efficient way to add audio to a QuickTime movie, see this MIDI demonstration page. (It's a little off-topic, but since MIDI rhymes with VIDI, it is included here).