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We have several 2 minute and under video clips that we need to include in a CD-Rom made with AW6. Yesterday we edited a clip in Avid Xpress DV 3 and then sent it to EZ Media Cleaner 5 which in turn gave us a 25 MB mpeg that starts skipping about half-way through the clip (it looks great until then). We tried something different this morning by having EZ Media Cleaner give us an AVI file. It didn't look as good, was 41 MB, but it doesn't skip or freeze up at all. It plays beautifully! We are running Win2000 and have played the clips in both QT and Win Media Player with the same results. We are probably missing something obvious here, but why does the smaller file skip rather than the larger file? If we need to make the Mpeg even smaller, how would we go about that (we would really prefer to use mpegs)?

The quick answer is that if you take a video clip and compress it into something smaller, it will always be more prone to skip. The reason is that in the end the system has a lot more work to do to uncompress the video when it needs to be shown In other words, the video must be uncompressed and the more it's compressed, the harder it will be for the system to uncompress it. If the machine is not fast, or you have other apps running, or memory is low, having an uncompressed video file is always going to run more smoothly, even if the file is much larger.