Carmen Ferrara’s Weblog 2.0

In Presio, when publishing to Flash - sometimes you are unable to view the player controls (play, pause, seek, the video itself) while previewing the presentation. The player area itself appears blank. In this brief screencast I describe the reasons for the issue, and show you how to fix it.

http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/flash_security/index.html

Beginning with Flash Player 8 Macromedia has changed the security model that’s applied to local Flash content. By default, Flash applications that are run from a user’s local file system rather than over HTTP have more limited privileges starting in Flash Player 8. By default, local Flash content - can no longer contact the Internet, perform HTTP communication, or communicate with local HTML files. The security measures are in place to ensure a system is secure even if it runs a malicious flash file directly on their machine - much like Microsoft has improved security around ActiveX controls.

So, what do these new security measures mean when publishing to Flash with Presio - well in certain cases, you may publish a presentation and the media player area (play, pause, seek bar, video itself) is blank.

Most of times this will not be an issue, because when you install Presio - directory is created that says trust Flash content created by the program Presio. Well, for a variety of reasons this may not always work. Windows permissions, publishing to shared drives, burning to CD/DVD, and other reasons may cause the special file to not be created properly.

I’ve gotten some questions lately on whether Presio supports PowerPoint animations. So I wanted to address that here. Presio supports PowerPoint animations to an extent. The visual aspect of the animation is not supported. For example, an  “Entrance->Fly In” animation will not “Fly In” so to speak. Instead, Presio detects that an animation has occurred and captures an image of the slide at that point. The image is captured once the animation effect has completed.  This allows the content of the animation (text, shape, image,etc) to be recorded and synchronized properly with the corresponding audio/video.  

To see how it works, and hear my brief explanation I created a quick Presio presentation demonstrating a simple slide with 4 PowerPoint animations. This will give you an idea of how it works, and what the output looks like for slides that contain animations.

http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/ppt_anims/index.html

We just pushed out a new release of Presio. This latest release now includes more support for MPEG-4 audio/video files. This allows you to import m4a, m4b, and m4v files into Presio. Once imported you can synchronize these files with PowerPoint slides or images just as you would any other Presio project. Better MPEG-4 support is a great feature as virtually all the video content on the iTunes Music store is in this format.

I’ve also created a screencast showing how to use Presio to embed MPEG-4 videos downloaded from iTunes into PowerPoint. Normally, any video content downloaded from iTunes could not be embedded within PowerPoint, but this tutorial walks through the steps of importing a m4v podcast, and then exporting the clip to a Windows Media file. Then I embed the video in a PowerPoint presentation and play it back in slideshow mode.

http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/import-mpeg4/index.html

As I describe in the screencast, one of Presio’s primary design goals was to work well with other applications. By supporting the import of so many different multimedia foramts, and allowing you to export to AVI, Windows Media, or Quicktime - Presio becomes just another tool in your multimedia content authoring toolbox.

In future tutorials, I’ll show you how to use Audacity to clean up your audio files and then import back into Presio.

Well, there have been 2 more releases of Presio since my last post, and I’m very pleased with the rate of new updates we’ve been able to achieve. One new feature I wanted to highlight with the latest release is Presio’s new “Microsoft Producer Import Wizard”.

I’ve long thought that Microsoft’s move to no longer support and/or update Microsoft Producer (last release was 2003) meant there was some opportunity for an alternative rich media presentation tool. Well, with the latest release of Presio I hope we’ve made the migration from Producer a bit easier.

We’ve a taken a simple, but I believe useful approach towards allowing existing Microsoft Producer users a way to import their projects and presentations into Presio. Essentially, Presio just needs 2 files - the original PowerPoint presentation used to create a Producer project, and a published Windows Media file.

Now, for very complex Producer projects (multiple PowerPoint files mixed with images) or where there were custom template changes, the Import Wizard will most likely not work. But, for a majority of the cases this will certainly automate the process. Running a Producer project through this tool converts it into a Presio project file. This allows users to take advantage of some of Presio’s benefits (not available in Producer) such as publishing to Flash, Quicktime, or MP4 formats, thereby solving some of Producer’s long-standing problems with operating system and browser compatibility. Presio presentations run on Windows and Mac as well as browsers not supported by Producer including Safari and Firefox.

I’ve created a quick screen cast tutorial on how to use the new Import Wizard: http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/import_producer/index.html

Also, here are the latest release notes. We’ve added or improved quite a few things so check it out. http://ipresent.net/support/presio-rel-notes.php