Distribution

[BPoese]

I make "Digital Signage" for a couple of smaller churches to play on Sundays. The videos are mostly just looping-videos of the announcements for that week that they play on a DVD player hooked up to a flat screen mounted up on a wall some place. Nothing fancy, just cheap and functional.

I was asked to consider making an "Announcement" video for another church that is not very close to where I live. They would like to download it and make their own DVD and play it. They still want the video quality of a DVD. I am not sure what format to make the downloadable file so that they can make their DVD and still have the DVD quality. And naturally, they would perfer not to have a mega-sized file to download. Any suggestions? These vidoes are generally only 3-6 minutes long. I am using Adobe Premiere CS4 for my editing software.

I did ask about running the video on a computer hooked up to the flat screen but they didi not seem interested in doing that for whatever reason.

Thanks
Bruce

[cmchamp]

How many displays will that church be showing the video on?
IF churches are going to go with a "digital signage" solution, it is my strong recommendation to utilize either HDMI/Gigabit or VGA/Cat5 for distribution and play off of one central player.
As for file size, IMHO your best option would be H.264.
I have a 6:37 video I did this past week that comes in at 243MB. Not something you're going to email, and I don't know how it will translate to DVD.
I did mine in FCP and exported using Compressor to the AppleTV setting which is 5133kbps, and I upsized it from SD 16:9 to 960x540.
Looks very good played from VLC, QuickTime or iTunes, or even from the MacOS Desktop Preview window.
C.

[BPoese]

Cory
Thanks for the comments. They will be showing it on one display screen, with an HDMI connection and upconverting the SD DVD with the DVD player.

This question is for me to think about... IF I do more of this, is there a way to upload the file to a "server" that they could access and download it from there? What am I actually looking for, in order to do that? I am sure it's out there, I just never paid any attention to it since I never needed to do that before.

Bruce

[bpalermini]

How big are the files? If they are less than 2 gig you could use Dropbox to move the file directly to the machine they play it from. It works really well.

[cmchamp]

I believe the client end is wanting to burn DVD's and play from a DVD player rather than from a CPU.
It would be better if you were able to look into utilizing something like this:
http://www.cayintech.com/
C