Quality problems with .mov

Question

I'm new to saving movies from PowerPoint, and I'm finding the high-res images (10"w x 300dpi jpg's) that look great in PP are coming out badly jagged and pixelated in the .mov's. Tried different export settings in File/SaveAsMovie/MovieOptions unsuccessfully. You'll probably need to look at the 100% size screen caps (linked) to see the problem, but I attached the pics to this post too.

For this project, I was given the PP file to use/copy, a bunch of hi-res psd's and the dimensions of the desired movie (1020pixels wide). My project is adding different graphics to several dozen PP's, making several dozen .mov's

Is this a project setup issue that can be fixed or is this poor quality mov export just what people have to settle for in PP? LMK if I haven't provided enough info. Thanks in advance!

Screen caps of the .movs   100%: http://postimg.org/image/jkeysww43/

Screen cap of PP   100%: http://postimg.org/image/6rv4lv78b/

Screen cap of .psd  100%: http://postimg.org/image/66s2eum67/

Answer 1

The most obvious problem is that you're comparing a 3000 pixel wide image to a 1020-pixel wide movie; the movie has roughly 1/3 the resolution of the original image in PPT, so you'd have to expect at least some degradation.

But not as much as you're seeing here (and thanks for the detailed info and links to screen grabs ... it really helps).

Movies are highly compressed.  One trick to compressing graphics is to reduce the color depth, which PPT will sometimes do when it exports an image.  This can lead to "The rats chewed on my text" and other similar symptoms.

Rather than letting PPT downsample the image as it makes the movie, try downsampling it in Photoshop to 1020 then inserting the downsampled image into PPT.  I'd also save as PNG rather than JPG.