Carmen Ferrara’s Weblog 2.0

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.

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.

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.

As part of my push to a final 1.0 of Presio, I’m creating a lot of “how to” screencast tutorials covering key features. I thought I’d share some here. These will all be posted as part of the new site redesign as well.

In this brief video, I demonstrate how to use the new Presio Image Editor tool, and specifically how to annotate (or draw) text directly on to a slide.

http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/image-editor-text-tool/index.html

Duration: 2 minutes 3 seconds

I came across this site today: “Mensa Intelligence Test“, and I just had to give it a try. Needless to say, I am not a genius (but I sure am close :]). I spent about 10 minutes on this thing and then gave up. I scored an 18, just one answer shy of “genius” status. Give it try.

I also made a quick screencast of my answers/results. Take a look if you’d like: Carmen’s Mensa Results