Category Archives: Projection

Everything pertaining to projection. Worship software, computers, switchers, projectors, etc.

Managing Installed Codecs

InstalledCodec Interface
InstalledCodec Interface

Have you ever wanted to know what codecs you have installed on your system?  Have you ever wanted to disable a codec?  I came across a great little utility recently that will let you do this.  It’s called InstalledCodec and you can download it free here.

I’ve been having lots of problems recently in Premiere Pro with the program crashing as soon as I attempt to import or export anything.  As soon as I would select either option from the menu, I would instantly be presented with the desktop.  PP was just gone.  This only happened in projects where I was using HDV mpeg files so I began to suspect a codec issue.  I could reproduce this crash consistantly every time.

Using InstalledCodec I found LOTS of mpeg codecs hanging around on my system from other software, even lots of software that I’ve since un-installed.  For instance, I’d installed a trial version of Avid and subsequently un-installed it, but I still had over 20 codecs that were listed as being from Avid.

Since most software, and your computer decide to use one codec over another based on something called “merit” many of these additional codecs that had been installed more recently then Adobe or even Microsoft’s codecs may be being utilized now instead of the original codecs that PP configured/verified when it was installed.

I used InstalledCodec to disable LOTS of codecs on my system and magically PP no longer crashes.  I completed the project I was working on without any further crashing issues.  In the image at the beginning of this post you can see the user interface with a bunch of the Avid codecs disabled.  Disabling a codec is as simple as selecting any codec you want from the list and selecting disable.

Making Backups of your Media – Cobian a free backup utility

Have you backed up your media lately?  If you haven’t, let this blog post serve as a reminder that you need to go back up your data.  You should be regularly backing up your work and media.  Crashing hard drives and lost data are a fact of life, and you can save yourself a lot of time and potentially money if you spend a little time and money upfront and setup a system to  regularly backup your data.

Cobian ver9

Cobian is a great free program that is easy to use and takes up little resources.  It creates backups at any interval you want (nightly, weekly, etc) of any source folder you specify to a location you specify.  I set it up to make an incremental back up of my ‘My Documents’ folder every night – any file that is new or modified gets backed up, and a full backup every week – the entire folder copied.  I use an external hard drive as the destination for the backup.

Yesterday I saw a 1TB western digital external hard drive on sale at Sams for $117.  That is cheap peace of mind for all of your hard work and archive of media files.

Widescreen in Power Point

Have you ever been given a ppt file that was created on a 4:3 monitor, but you want to project it on a widescreen projector?  Usually when you project this type of file, there are black bars on the left and right sides of the screens and the content is still 4:3.

Here is how you can make the file widescreen.  Go to File – Page Setup, in the width and height boxes enter 16 for width and 9 for height.  Click ok and now your slides are widescreen.

pptwidescreen