Carmen Ferrara’s Weblog 2.0

We recently had a customer ask if it was possible to publish a Presio presentation using a widescreen video clip, and have the aspect ratio preserved.  You can, but there are a couple of steps you need to take to ensure that Presio publishes your video with the correct size.

Here’s a screencast tutorial that shows how to do it:

http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/widscreen-tut/index.html

Recently, I’ve received some questions on how to use Presio’s transcript feature.  So, I’ve gone ahead and put together a screencast tutorial that shows how to add synchronized transcript text to each slide within a Presio presentation.

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

Here are steps described in the the tutorial: 

1. Create a new Presio project and synch up slides with audio or video
2. Go to the “Review” tab
3. While on the “Review” tab click the “Edit” tab - (This will give you a list of your media clips and the related synched slides)
4. Choose the first slide in the list and click the “Edit Slide” button

Once here you just need to enter in the text associated with each slide into the “Slide Notes” box for each slide.  The text you enter in this box will appear in the “Slide Notes” tab after you’ve published the presentation.  This text will be synchronized with each slide.  If you’d like you can also change the title of the “Notes” tab to “Transcript” if you’d like as well.

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Presio 1.3, which is now available for download.

This release includes several bug fixes and improvements, but we’ve also added a great new feature that allows you to specify the output quality of a published presentation.   There are 3 presets (High, Medium, Low) and you may also setup your own custom encoder settings.  You can specify your own frame rate, bit rate and frame size (in pixels).

The ability to customize the output quality of the published video file allows more flexibility when determining the inherent trade-off in distributing web video - quality vs. file size.  This new release of Presio will allow you to better manage that often difficult decision.

Release notes are listed below this entry as well as on our release notes history page - also feel free to download this new release directly from our download page. As always, if you have an earlier version of Presio, you can simply download and install the newest version right over the old one. All your settings and previous projects are preserved.

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Release Notes - Presio 1.3.10 - June 12, 2008

• Added: Ability to specify output quality of encoded video using presets or customizing your own settings (bit rate, frame size, frame rate)
• Added: New player template for Windows Media Video (Default - Speaker Left)
• Fixed: Resolved issue of importing and working with 2 or more PowerPoint presentations
• Fixed: Resolved issue of importing WMA9 Voice audio files
• Fixed: Cetain characters now display properly within slide titles
• Fixed: IE6 Flash rendering bug
• Improved: Added ability to Cancel the media import process
• Improved: Media file import process maintains the original media’s quality settings

In the latest version of Presio, we have redesigned the Review Tab. We’ve divided the “Review” process into two,  more logical (and functional) options called: Preview and Edit. Using the Preview tab, you are now able to see what your Presio published presentation will look like to your end viewers, before actually publishing it. The audio/video plays back and all the slides are in synch with the media.

The Edit tab allows you to modify your project by managing captured slides and clips that have already been recorded/imported. You can change slide titles, slide notes, or slide time points.  You may also import/export clips and slides as well as use the new crop tool to trim any clip within Presio.

To understand how the features of the Review Tab work, take look at the screencast:

http://www.ipresent.net/support/tutorials/review_tab_overview/index.html

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately as to whether or not Presio templates can be customized or not. Presio ships with a set of webcast templates for both audio and video presentations and for a particular media output format. You can see some examples here.

You may however, create your own custom player templates. With some basic HTML skills, you can customize any aspect of an existing template or create a new one from scratch.

Here’s a screencast tutorial that shows an example of customizing the “Default” template by creating a new version with one key modification to meet your needs:
http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/custom_templates2

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Presio 1.2 - (1.2.35 to be exact). This is a rather large minor release. We’ve incorporated a lot of great feedback that we’ve received from our early users, since releasing V 1.0 back in February.

Not only are there bug fixes and improvements, but we’ve also added quite a few new features. Some key additions include: a simplified (and more intuitive) Review Tab redesign, new player templates, higher resolution slide captures, ability to crop clips, and more.

Release notes are listed below this entry as well as on our release notes history page - also feel free to download this new release directly from our download page. As always, if you have an earlier version of Presio, you can simply download and install the newest version right over the old one. All your settings and previous projects are preserved.

I’ll be posting some screencasts/tutorials on some of the new features in the 1.2 release in the coming days.

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Presio Release 1.2.35 (May 2, 2008)

• Added: New player templates (Default and Classic - with Speaker Left or Right)
• Added: New slideshow player templates (PIP and Side-by-side) with title fade-in
• Added: Configure Slide Publish settings - up to 4 sizes and toggle on/off
• Added: Configure default PowerPoint window size for capture (increases slide capture resolution)
• Added: Windows Media video template support for linking to Presentation Details page
• Added: New Flash Default template with speaker video on right side
• Added: New Seek to Time feature
• Added: New Seek Back/Forward 1 second at a time
• Added: Synch Tab - Undo last captured slide
• Added: Review Tab - clip crop tool for easy head/tail trimming of clips
• Fixed: Dragging Media Slider on Synch Tab to allow better seeking during playback
• Fixed: Apostrophe issue when loading PowerPoint files across shared drive
• Fixed: Clip name issue when deleting clip with same name as next in sequence
• Fixed: Slide animations “off by one” bug
• Fixed: Flash playback issue on Mac Safari
• Fixed: Add any filetype as an attachment on the Details Tab
• Improved: Local Flash playback support with less security issues
• Improved: Redesigned Review tab - Preview/Edit improved user experience
• Improved: Save project dialog when creating a new project (more intuitive)
• Improved: Lots of minor bug fixes and overall improved stability…

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