.WMV Hell

It started simply enough. I'd created a corporate health video for my company as one of our goals for the year. It was finished in a few weeks, looked great, and was well-received by my team. All that was left was uploading it to the company site, at which point El Roberto officially became a victim of the Mac vs. PC deathmatch. You see my company like most runs with Windows. And their system only plays windows media files or Mpeg 2 quicktime. It was also required for the vids to be compressed to under 50 mb(ha!). Our first issue was conversion. It is almost impossible to convert a mac-based video file into a decent-looking windows media file without plunking down almost $200 for a Flip4Mac program. We downloaded several converter programs from download.com, but the compression on all of them was crappy. If the audio wasn't muffled, then the video was ridiculously pixelated. This has been going on for almost two weeks now. Sleepless nights attempting to convert .mov files to .wmv and getting crap. Scouring endless Mac forums on converting files to .wmv and coming up with nothing. I could go on, but you get the point. Finally, after talking with some co-workers, I found out I could finangle myself some extra room on the network and did not have to necessarily post the vid on the website at 50mb or under. I could actually link to the vid at a much higher size. So tonight, we finally were able to create a slick .avi file that works in windows media player and is a decent size. Hallelujah!!! (Angels cry)

So some tips for you people out there attempting to convert Mac files to Windows Media compatible format: Don't do it!! Jk, but make sure you use a decent converter like FLV Crunch, and DON'T attempt to compress to anything under 100MB or you'll end up like us-hairless with high blood pressure..