WMV's in presentation blinks at beginning & end-PowerPoint 2003

[GC]

All my WMV's animations (3 of them) in a ppt file start with a stutter or
slight blink & also blinks the same way after clicking an action arrow to
advance the slide. It's as if PowerPoint uses a still image of the WMV then
starts the actual animation so the switch between the two causes a persieved
stutter. It's not very professional looking.

I added all the WMV's to the PPT using PFCMedia.

Attached is a screen shot of the Custom Animation.
The Play Movie Effect is set to start "From Beginning" & Stop "On click".

Any help would be appreciated.

Gary

 

[Austin Myers]

All my WMV's animations (3 of them) in a ppt file start with a stutter or
slight blink & also blinks the same way after clicking an action arrow to
advance the slide. It's as if PowerPoint uses a still image of the WMV
then starts the actual animation so the switch between the two

You are correct, this is how all media is played in POT. The delay (stutter)
you are seeing is PPT calling the file, loading it into ram, deciding on the
codec needed to play the media, loading it into ram, and then loading he MCI
media player and finally playing the media file.

There are things you can do to minimize this, but you can't completely
eliminate it. The biggest things is to defrag the hard drive. As explained
above a lot of disk activity is used to play media in PPT, having a well
organized hard drive with contiguous files makes it much easier.

There are also other factors such as the amount of video ram avaiable, the
device driver for the video system, what other apps you have running
(including anti-virus), having animations at or about the same time as the
media begins to play (including slide transitions) etc.

All in all, the ideal situation is to run the presentation on a machine with
a defragged hard drive and no other apps running in the back ground.