103^rd General Meeting
May 18 - May 22, 2003
Washington, DC

Links to Other Pages:

103^rd General Meeting Program Call for Abstracts
AV-Information
Preparing Your Presentation
The Speaker Ready Room
PC User Considerations
Apple User Considerations

Most presentation software include the capability to embed video or sound clips into the structure of your presentation. While this multimedia approach is very effective, there are inherent problems when transporting these files from the system it was created on to another location and computer.

Please note that simple animation effects such as sequential showing of bullets, dissolves between slides and other transition effects are "simple" format enhancements internal to the presentation software and, in general, require no special handling or concerns when transporting the presentation between computer systems. In contrast, inserting a movie clip or sound file into a presentation requires the dynamic linking of two (or more) files that have to be transferred together when you bring your presentation to the meeting.

Movies and, to a certain extent, sound files in their native state are very large electronic files and there are numerous ways to prepare and display them on your computer. One of the more effective ways to reduce overall size of the file and increase the effectiveness of the system when you play it is to save the file at a low to moderate resolution. While high resolution files do increase the fidelity of the image, they are difficult to process by most computers and can cause jerky or stilted images on the screen.

Choosing the right file format is important since some of these formats will only work on a PC platform and others only on a MAC; some, but not many, even work on both. In addition, files are routinely compressed to minimize storage on your hard disk and saved using a compressor/decompressor or codec protocol. Therefore, it is important to ensure your files are saved in a format that works on any platform and uses a codec acceptable to the system in use at the General Meeting. The centralized server in use at the General Meeting is preloaded with the codecs listed below. While other codecs are available and can be retrieved as downloadable files from the internet, this will take time and time may be at a premium when you are in the speaker ready room.

Preferred File Formats: AVI or MPG

Required Codecs:
Cinepak
Intel Indeo Video R3.2
Indeo 5.10
Intel RAW
Mpeg 1
Mpeg 2
MS Mpeg 4
Divx 3/4/5