Openworld FlashPresenter - Synchronization Overview

Synchronizing different components of your Presentation

This is by far the most important step in putting together the different components (video/audio, graphics, slides, Transcript, and hyperlinks elements) of your presentation. It is easily done using time markers. Click on the “Synchronizer” icon at the left side of your Openworld Flash Presenter workspace and when you want to time-synchronize the different parts of your presentation.

How synchronization works:

Take a look at the illustration below, to understand at a glance how synchronizing works in Openworld FlashPresenter

The first component to put into your presentation is the video/audio track. The video/audio track is required for playing the speaker's narration, and enables Openworld Flash Presenter to advance a presentation from its start point towards its end point.

Note: The video/audio track by itself cannot let users efficiently navigate the contents of a presentation. For instance, if the video is stopped mid-session and the viewer wants to go back a few paces to re-run and see again a part of the presentation for the second time, it is a matter of luck (or trial-and-error) to zero-in on the desired cue-point for viewing. Viewers of an Openworld Flash Presenter talk - or any other multimedia presentation - cannot easily access a desired part of a presentation simply by using the video/audio navigation control. The challenge of navigating a presentation becomes much easier, however, when the viewer has access to an associated text Transcript and/or a detailed Contents menu. The viewer in this case can exactly locate the desired portion of a presentation without having to move the video/audio track controller back and forth to find it. Openworld Flash Presenter accordingly synchronizes its Transcript and Contents menu text files with the timeline of the video/audio track and other components such as the slides and hyperlinks, to enable easy navigation of the material in a presentation.

The process of synchronizing the text Transcript with the timeline of the associated material in the video/audio track uses a drag and drop system for setting time values. The simplest ways to do so is to press the «Play» arrow to launch your media file - and then press the “Pause” button in the media player wherever you would like to insert a time tag into your Transcript. The time value that is showing in the yellow label area in your paused media player can be dragged and dropped into the associated paragraph of the Transcript text file, automatically creating the correct time tag. You can achieve the most accurate synchronization of your presentation by repeating, from start to finish, this drag and drop transfer of the time value in the media player at the start of each paragraph in the Transcript.

Once you have synchronized the Transcript with the video/audio track, the next step is to synchronize the other components - including the Content menu items, slides, and hyperlinks - with the time markers already placed in the Transcript. In so doing, you do not have to worry about directly assigning a time value to these components. Instead, you only have to locate the corresponding point in the text Transcript where the Content item, slide, or hyperlink should appear, and drag-and-drop the selected item into the Transcript at this desired location. It will then display in a synchronized manner when your presentation is viewed, because the time tags have earlier been assigned throughout the Transcript.