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other company names and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. We reserve
the right to change the specifications without prior notice.
MultiQ DSMS 3.6 User Guide, Media players operated in standalone mode, Version 2, 18/08/2011
24
6.3.2
Preparing video clips
Today video cameras produce Full HD video clips in the MPEG-4 (h.264) format directly. This is
more or less the industry standard for HD. Therefore video clips from modern HD video cameras
can be directly uploaded to the system.
Video clips in other formats are recommended to be converted into MPEG-4 (h.264) before use.
There are lots of freeware available that do the conversion with no visible loss of quality. Video
editing software such as “Pinnacle Studio” and others have all export filters for MPEG-4 (h.264) up
to 1080p Full HD. It is recommended to produce content in the same resolution as the resolution
of the area to be used on the screen. Adapting to the native resolution of the screen always give
superior results. Conversion to MPEG-4 (h.264) can be done using the “Super” freeware from
eRightsoft (
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
) .
YouTube video clips can be downloaded from YouTube in full HD MPEG-4 (h.264) using the
YouTube download part of DVD VideoSoft Free Studio (
http://dvdvideosoft.com/
).
All video editing software allows for adding text with your own choice of fonts and colours on top of
your video clips.
6.3.3
Converting PDFs into images before use
It is recommended to convert PDFs (often multi page PDFs) to separate images and to put them
into one playlist per PDF. It is possible to use single page PDFs directly as media spots in the
system but converting the files to images before uploading to the system can improve performance.
Always use PDFs with better resolution than is to be used on the screen (which most PDFs are
since they are intended for print). Then convert the PDFs into single image files having the same
resolution as the area to be used on the screen. Conversion can be done with Photoshop or by
specialized
software
for
conversion
such
as
Office
Convert
(
http://www.officeconvert.com/
).
6.3.4
Converting Flash animations into MPEG-4 (h.264) files
The system can use Flash animation, SWF files as media spots in playlists. However it is
recommended to convert the SWFs to MPEG-4 (h.264) files before use. The reason for this is that
the media players and media monitors have video hardware acceleration and the performance is
much better when using video than SWF files. This also relieves the processor from handling the
animation. By converting to MPEG-4 (h.264) you can run any Flash animation in 1080p Full HD.
6.3.5
Converting Power Point presentations into images or video clips
Power Points are by default produced in the 4:3 aspect ratio. This does not work well with modern
16:9 aspect ratio monitors. Therefore the Power Point files need to be redesigned to the 16:9
format before being used for digital signage in widescreen monitors. An alternative is to keep the
4:3 format and to only use a part of the screen for the presentation. Then the Power Point
presentation can be converted into either a sequence of JPG or PNG images or to a video clip.
Converting into images is easy. Just export your Power Point presentation into images by choosing
JPG or PNG as output formats. Power Point will batch convert the images into a folder. The images
can then be uploaded to the MultiQ system and presented as a sequence of images in a playlist.