Carmen Ferrara’s Weblog 2.0

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

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…

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.