CS5.5 .avi settings - daktronics

Question

I've searched through a handful of forums with similar questions, but never seem to find the specific circumstance I am encountering. Hopefully someone here might know of a workaround for me, or point me in the right direction.
I work for a live venue (arena) and do the video creative for the LED ribbon and video boards for all of our events. We use Daktronics software to import and play all content files, and unfortunately, the only video file type this system is set up to read is an uncompressed 29.97, square pixels at 9,264x32, RGB, best quality, millions of colors, no codec, .AVI file. Previously, in my CS4 and CS3, the file > Export > .AVI was an option so I simply set those settings as my default, and this was the only way to guarentee the file rendered was indeed these exact specifications.
I now have CS5.5 and found that the .avi export is now listed under the traditional render settings, however, when I chose this option and set my non-codec/file settings, the file it exports is still writing the content as a millions of colors+, which will NOT work on the daktronics equipment, even though the settings list it as not +. For the time being I've been creating in CS5.5, rendering as an .AVI, and then taking the video file into my personal computers AE CS4 and re-exporting with the proper settings.
I understand this is a very rare circumstance, but does anyone have any suggestions or perhaps codec installs/updates they could think might help me in this situation? Unfortunately I can't have them change the entire daktronics system to take new file types. I have tried rendering the .AVI's with every option I could think of under the render settings, and nothing has worked thus far.
I appreciate any feedback and input anyone can spare.
Thank you,
Jenae

Answer 1

The problem is that Adobe is writing compressed video in a non-standard way.  Data is written in an AVI file in chunks with four character codes (FCCs) to define the chunks and some items in the chunks.  There are two FCCs that can be used to define video frame chunks, “00db” for an uncompressed frame or “00dc” typically for a compressed frame.  If “00dc” is used for uncompressed video the compression code is supposed to be “DIB “ which means a DIB codec, which is basically uncompressed.  Adobe’s CS5 is writing video chunks with the “00dc” code but not specifying the “DIB “ compression code but instead just putting in null characters.  This would appear to be a violation of the AVI specification and is the reason that earlier versions of the Venus 7000 do not work with these files.  CS4 and earlyer versions used the "00db" FCC so they did not have the problem.
Venus 7000 version 6.24.0.1 is the first version to have the fix that supports the non-standard CS5 uncompressed AVIs.