DVD for presentation?

[Michael Coviello]

Has anyone burned a dvd of exported revit images? or even *.AVI's to play on a regular old dvd player?
I'd like to get a dvd burner and upgrade roxio cd creator to the latest version?
I think this would be great for design review meetings. I love how instantly parametric revit is, but usually what i show clients is paper (which doesn't have the same impact).
Ultimately i'd like to be able have a laptop w/revit on in our conf. room but until then i was wondering about having this ability to at least show a small slide show and/or some avi's created from walkthroughs.

[artitech]

As far as burning AVI files to DVD in a format that will play on most DVD players, you will need to convert the AVI file to MPEG2 format using a program like Cucusoft or TMPGenc 3 Xpress and then burn it to DVD using a program such as TMPGenc DVD Author (it's converts MPEG files to Video_TS, which DVD movies are made of). With TMPGenc DVD uthor, you can burn multiple MPEG's to one DVD, which is nice.

[beegee]

Michael,

Another idea, load the DWF Viewer onto your clients computer and show them the 3D model. Hide the roof, transparent the walls, spin, perspective.

They'll be impressed, I'm sure.

[mlgatzke]

Michael,

Buy Nero Deluxe ($99 full retail - I've seen it on sale for $39 after rebates). This is the best cd/dvd burning software I've seen (lots of control and features) and it has an applet in it to convert multiple AVIs, create the menu system, and burn it all to dvd. I've used it and it's pretty awesome. Easy to use too.

[MartyC]

I've done a couple of presentations on simple old VCD. Havent got a DVD burner yet, but have found most DVD players play VCD on CD/R media. CDR's can be burned on yer old CD burner no worries, and I only have limited Nero v? that came with the burner.

I use Pinnacle Studio to compose the thing with transitions, animations, stills etc, bit of cool music in the background and a few text pages. Render to an .mpeg and burn as a VCD. Put it in the DVD player and voila, project sold! I believe Windows Movie Maker does much the same for composing.

Of course, with a groovy DVD burner and all the stuff, one can make an oscar winning presentation, but for simple but very effective presentation, tools at hand can do wonders.

I agree with Beegee, but I find a significant number of my clients, while purporting to be computer literate, can only press the big green 'go' button, start email, and compose a short letter with bad formatting. If I throw dwf at em they go, .....duuh...what? They can usually deal with a DVD player.tho.

CheersM

[Chad Smith]

I've only ever create one DVD and that was a few years ago.
It had a menu at the front where the client could select still images and flybys.

The flybys had text that came up on the screen to point out various parts of the building.
Looked really sweet, and we won the job. It's a shame the finished building looks completely different to my original design.

[aggockel50321]

I find an effective tool for myself is the Imove pan viewer. I'm forever doing interior office plans here, and I'll just do a pan file, burn the viewer and the pan file on a dvd, & send it over to the person involved.

It's easy to walk them through how to use the viewer over the phone, and they seem to like the pan & zoom features that allow them to stop & study different areas of the space.