9. Resources

Fri - March 3, 2006

Software to help set up projectors

Here is a link to a handy utility for setting up your projectors or displays
http://www.showsage.com/utilities.html It's free, but they want your name and email address. Seems a reasonable trade to me.
Available for Mac and PC in different resolutions. That's it.

Nothing else to say really.

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Tue - February 7, 2006

PC based video file player software - part 1

One of my quests is to find inexpensive software that works well for playing playlists of video files directly from a PC or Mac. Here's another contender: AV Player HD from Neuromixer

In these days of fast laptops, HD resolutions and better than XGA projector resolutions, it seems a bit 19th century to still be plodding on with NTSC and PAL and tape decks and DVDs etc. etc.

So...how to do reliable, cue-able, controllable video playback from a PC or mac?

Here's one option AV Player HD from Neuromixer - price is right and it claims to be able to play back HD res files and of course supports dual-monitor control - controls on one monitor and fullscreen playback on the other.

Unfortunately I can't test it on my laptop as the integrated Intel graphics aren't up to it, but worth a look if you are PC based and looking to do hi res video playback directly to a projector.

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Thu - January 26, 2006

Free Software to play SWF files in Powerpoint

If you ever have the need to play Flash animation files (SWF) inside a Powerpoint presentation, then there's a hard way and an easy way. Here's the easy way - SWF Point Player from GlobFX . Read more to see how it solved our problem...

I recently had a situation where a client had developed a looping Flash animation of slides for their pre-show graphics and also for an advert.
The problem was figuring out how to play this from the PC we were using for other graphics tasks like song words and Powerpoint files.
I thought about converting it to DVD, but that would have lost quality. Then we played with using a web browser fullscreen, but that was too hard to cue.
Eventually, after a quick web search I found two ways to do it. One involved adding a custom action and editing some fields to call the right SWF file etc. It worked but was VERY cumbersome.
The other involved downloading the free plug-in for Powerpoint called Swiff Point Player from GlobFX .
This installs a new menu item in the INSERT menu in Powerpoint to insert a FLASH MOVIE. You can then resize the movie as you need and it will play when you first show the slide. Effectively Powerpoint becomes a 'playlist manager' for SWF files. Cool.
It's a very neat solution to cue-ing up simple SWF movies, especially if they are being shown in sequence with other normal powerpoint slides.
Enjoy.

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Thu - August 18, 2005

Countdown movie file

This is a countdown movie file in motion jpeg quicktime format

countdownjpeg.mov is a countdown that can be used at the top of a playback video insert to help the tape operator to cue the video to exactly the right place.
It is scaled so it isn't too dominant on the screen if you do accidentally show it live, or you can overlay the clip information e.g. title, duration, audio requirements or in and out scenes for cueing.