images/movies from ibook to projector

[dyagetme]

can anyone tell me the process of projecting images/movies from an ibook?
which cables do I need? what dpi are the images projected at? what size should the images in my laptop need to be to produce great results when projected?
You're talking to a virgin here.

[holly]

First off, projectors:

If you've ever hooked up the lil guy to an external monitor or television, you'll see that a projector works the same way. Basically, what ever shows on your screen shows up on the projector. You will not have dual monitors, only video mirroring, so many VJ softs will be useless to you. Just so you know in the future....

There's too ways to connect, Apple's A/V cable will give you composite video out which will plug into all projectors and mixing boards. You can also get a VGA monitor cable and get higher resolution, but not if you want to use a mixing board. If you're showing hi-rez Photoshop images, OsX has an amazing built-in screen saver that automagicly makes a folder of photos look like a documentary sequence from PBS.

For video in OsX you will want to download the free Cellulo player. It allows you to load up a playlist of all your movies and present them fullscreen.

There are way too many variables for me to tell you what format, resolution, frame rate, and codec your movies will look best at on your machine. If you're serious about video learn everything you can about Quicktime. It's not just a player, it's an architecture. Once you've mastered QT you can make real decisions (not just experiments) about how to encode your video.

Holly.