Using Multimedia in Impatica

Should you have any "heavy" technical questions, the Impatica technical support group folks are MUCH better equipped to respond. They can be reached Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5:30 pm at: 1-800-548-3475 ext. 238, or support@impatica.com .

Regarding Video:

Your video files must be AVI format video files. We recommend that they be uncompressed but many clients have used compression codecs successfully. Your best results will obviously come from using raw, uncompressed video footage.

The video must be inserted on the slide using the " Insert " menu.

Choose: Insert -> Movies and Sounds -> Movie from File -> Navigate and select the video file

Once you click OK, you will be asked if you want the video to play automatically:

Select YES .

IMPORTANT:

Ensure that you do not move the video from its location. If you do, it will not be found by Impatica for PowerPoint and therefore, not converted.

Inserting the video as an object is not supported. The above method is the only one that will work.

You can insert uncompressed AVI video (24 Bit, 12 fps recommended) with PCM format Wav (required) audio. Our suggested audio settings are 8000 HZ, 16 Bit, Mono. Using higher quality sound will not result in better sound as our software will down sample your audio to these settings. Using higher quality audio settings is supported but, due to the down sampling, the conversion time for your file will increase. Other audio types (i.e. MP3) are not supported .

The files that will be produced by default during the conversion are: an *.html file, an ImPlayer(version#).jar file (the player), a *-imp.jar file (your compressed PowerPoint) and a *.imv file for each video within the PowerPoint.

When you use Impatica for PowerPoint to upload the presentation to your server, these files will be transferred to your server for streaming. If you are placing the files on your server manually, you will need to upload all of these files to the same location (folder). You use the *.html file to invoke the streaming process.

Those using a Learning Management System (LMS), should select to create a "Zip package" (this setting is available on the "Extra Output Files" tab of the software) of these files and then upload them to the LMS file system. We have tutorials on our web site that describe this process:

http://www.impatica.com/support/tutorials-v3-ppt.html

Regarding Sound:

We do not recommend a single background sound file be used in streaming presentations. The reason for this is that the elements of your PowerPoint presentation are streamed to the viewer's browser cache in the order that they appear in the presentation. Having a large sound file on the first slide of the presentation that streams over several (or all) slides, is problematic on two levels.

First, the large file will delay the commencement of the playback for the viewer as the entire contents of the first slide must be received before the presentation begins to play.

Second, the sound file will be in the viewers cache and will play back without concern for network congestion or timing issues. Given this, if there is a delay in the playback of any slide along the way, your well thought out timing will no longer be maintained. This is a factor of streaming media and the internet - it is not under our control. We have provided for more control by including a "Wait for sound at end of slide" feature on our translator. What this will do, is ensure that a sound file, inserted on a single slide, will play completely before the slide transition can occur. This feature ensures that your automatic animation timings remain synchronized with your sound file. In short, break up your sound so that you have a clip per slide or so that the clip does not play over more than 2 or 3 slides. Any longer than that and the issue I raised above will come into play. If you are simply using music as a background sound, try adding a fade in and fade out effect to each music clip.

There are specific sound settings required for use with Impatica for PowerPoint. Below are some tips for using sound that you could check:

1. - Ensure that you are using the proper sound settings when recording narration.

They are: 8000 HZ; 16 Bit; Mono; 16 Kbps (if available); PCM Format.

The translator will down-sample any PCM format .wav files to these setting anyway. Recording with these settings will allow you to hear your result before the file is translated.

If you are using sound files that you did not create, I suggest you resample them to these settings before putting them in your PowerPoint presentation (see point 3 below).

The newest version of the software ( v332) permits the option of using "Compressed", uLaw (5XCompact) or PCM WAV (10XCompact) sound compression. If you do not use "Compressed" sound then the resulting Impatica file will be substantially larger. In order to reach the widest audience, we recommend that the "Compact" sound compression setting be used.  If bandwidth is not an issue for your audience you can use one of the other audio compression settings.

2. - We recommend that you create your narration wav files in a quiet environment with a med-high quality microphone. A professional sound studio is the best but if this is not convenient or possible, then a good microphone and sound editing software can result in very good quality recordings.

3- We also have a tutorial on adding narration to your presentation. You can view it at:

http://www.impatica.com/support/tutorials-v3-ppt.html

The tutorial offers four methods for adding sound into a PowerPoint for use with Impatica for PowerPoint.

4- Please also adjust your PowerPoint settings for embedded sound file size within PowerPoint.

1- Open the presentation in PowerPoint

2- Select Tools -> Options

3- On the resulting dialogue box select the General tab.

4- In the area for " Link sounds with file size greater than... " settings, change this number to 50,000 KB from the usual default size of 100 kb.

If your sound files are larger than those that PowerPoint allows to have embedded, by default (100 KB), in a presentation then your sound files will be linked to your presentation. If the link is broken then your sound will not translate with the PowerPoint. In order to avoid this, I advise that you arrange to have all of your sound files embedded rather than linked. With both methods, the size of the resulting Impatica file will be the same.