compressing slideshow

[Clive Timmons]

Hello all,

Can anyone give me a good way to compress a slide show ? I wish to email a 4.5mb show to a member of our Forum and I cannot make the images any smaller than I have already done the mp3 is only 1.1mb with 34 images at 3.4mb not a lot really if you have read any of my posts in the past you will know I am not the brightest spark in the technical department so make your solutions simple please thanks

Regards Clive.

[alrobin]

Clive,

One thing you could do is reduce the quality of the jpegs (e.g. use 20% instead of 50% or whatever compression ration you are using now.) And, by using MIDI instead of mp3, you could cut out another meg (provided the choice of music is not critical).

[Guest guru]

Yes, Clive, PTE .exe files are already compressed, so you can compress them (even if you use the excellent Winzip) no more than 0.5% (!). The only effective way is what Alrobis says.

[think(box)]

Clive, there are no file compressors that will give any more than a few percent reduction in file size. JPEG and MP3 content is already "compressed". You have to reduce the JPEG image quality (re-process your JPEGs) and image pixel size (800x600, or 640x480, or less) to save much space. You can resample your MP3 music at a lower bit rate, like 96Kbps (poor sound quality) to reduce MP3 space (if you know how) or even make the sound monaural to make MP3s take half the space. Both of these methods are really recoding your content (and require recreating show) to take less space, and will take a lot of your time. Then it's even worse if you haven't done this before. To top it off quality may be unacceptable.

Are you interested in not wasting your time, keeping your show at present file size and sending it anyway? There are many ways to do this, from simple to tech-heavy (for all forum members' benefit):

1. BEST: Do you and the destination member have AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) or MSN Messenger? Through these app's you can send 100's of Megabytes as fast as your Internet connections can go. Look in help for specific instructions. This is really the best way to share large files. And you don't use email to do it. You and the other member must use the same service for the transfer. AOL and MSN are not compatible with each other for file sharing.

2. GOOD: If you own WinZip version 8.1 or newer: It will split your showfile into 1MB emailable files, or whatever size your email service requires. The member to whom you are sending the multiple 1MB emails must have a Zip V2.0 standard-compatible zip application to unsplit and reassemble your large showfile. In WinZip help look under "Splitting".

3. MORE TECH-HEAVY: There are freeware file splitters all over the world. Try your favorite shareware sites.

4. VERY NICE, BUT VERY TECH-HEAVY: WinZip, Inc. has a "self-extracting Zip" tool (over $50 to buy) that will split ANYTHING into file sizes of your choice in a complete .EXE file set with the software needed to unsplit and unzip built-in to the .EXE file. The other member needs NO zip or other software. Like with P2E they just double-click the .EXE file you made, once all splits have been placed in a single folder.

[Clive Timmons]

Thanks Al, Guido ,Bill,

You were all of great help ,I took the easy option and removed the music but you stuck to the brief and kept it simple I am very interested in Bills suggestion of msn sounds like what I need ,so hopefully Sue gets the email. Great stuff folks Keep on rocking

Regards Clive. :