What's the cheapest way to show a QuickTime video at an exhibition without burning it to a DVD?

With the right transcription software, you should be able to keep a pretty high quality.

My two questions to you:

- What resolution is their display? Standard TV is 480i, a lot of non-HD LCD’s are 480p.
If you’re trying to run a 1080p animation through a 480i TV it’s not going to look any better than on dvd.

- Have you tried it? =)
I only ask because I’m frequently surprised at stuff that I don’t think should look good, turning out to look just fine.

Other than that… see if you can scare up someone to lend the exhibit a blu-ray or hd-dvd player & find someone to burn it to an apropriate disc in HD… that will give the gallery a similar-to-dvd interface, and you HD quality.

hard to answer without knowing the specific codec used to encode the video file. QuickTime .mov is a format but the encoding scheme used will greatly affect quality. That said DVD is also a format (MPEG-2) so the results of converting from QuckTime to MPEG-2 are dependent in part to the codec you use to do the conversion and the DVD encoder as well.

Thanks for the answers—here are some more details about the problem.
The animation is made from single png format images, they are then put into quicktime pro and animated. quicktime does save them as a .mov but my question is, if i convert that .mov to mpeg2, and then burn it to dvd, will the quality look better then just burning a .mov to dvd?

DVD as a format is native MPEG-2; the encoding part is the same if using QuickTime Pro, but i am guessing what you are asking is whether or not to leave as a native .mov or convert to MPEG 2 prior to DVD burning. IMHO it would seem like an extra step to first convert to MPEG2. Are you using iDVD for burning the DVD? Or are you on a PC? If I were in your shoes I would do a test-one with just the .PNG-based .mov directly into your DVD burning software, and one with the MPEG2xonversion