Congratulations to Pr Delmotte, from French Medical Sport Society, who developped 4 Speechis using new video/PowerPoint synchronisation features during summertime. Those Speechis are based from conferences that were recorded live. They use :

• smart one-click post-sync.
• new custom sizing of left colum video by the author

The 4 Speechis can be freely accessed from the Society’s site. (just click on the red square).

Conference in Rennes

Conference in Grenoble

Conference in Toulouse

Conference in Paris

Speechi 3 gives users the possibility to synchronize their PowerPoint with a Flash video in just one click (this is the smart mode). The person watching the Speechi on the Internet can then change the video size live by just pulling the small handle located at the bottom right.

But, until now, this modification could only be done at viewing time. Every Speechi would appear with same “default” proportions for the video.

Speechi authors can now modify the Speechi default proportions - video colum and slide size. They can do this very easily.

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The Smart Mode is the quickest way to synchronize a video with your PowerPoint, provided your video has been filmed while you were showing you Powerpoint (using Speechi) to your audience. In many cases, this is just not the case. For instance, you may have a video handy that was filmed some time earlier and now that you have heard of Speechi powerful video features, you want to show your video synchronized with your PowerPoint.

This tends to happen often in Universities where lots of classes have already been filmed - but of course the Powerpoint content as such has not been processed yet.

In this case, you should use Speechi Simple Import mode. Speechi Simple Import mode lets you quickly synchronize your video with each slide - and with each slide’s transition. It is not a "One Click" mode like the Smart Mode, however, it allows rapid and efficient video / PowerPoint post-synchronization.

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A podcast lets you create a list of audio files that users and students can subscribe to. When you update this list (what you can do automatically with Speechi 3.0), students automatically download or access the updates and can listen to them via iTunes or any RSS reader.

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The new Speechi 3.0 version introduces major new features related to video and video / PowerPoint synchronization.

The new "Smart Import" feature is a major breakthrough, because it allows you to instantaneously create synchronized PowerPoint presentations with video embedded into them. Tools that allow such constructions typically cost 10 to 100 times as much as Speechi - not to mention you need hours to obtain a result close to what you will automatically get with Speechi.

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The majority of the video cameras on the market will provide you with an initial format in AVI, MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 (format produced by our camera Sony). It is then necessary to convert the format into FLV. The step is identical to that which should be done to insert a video FLV on a blog. To do this, there are several free and commercial tools available. We use a product called Riva FLV encoder. It is free and it accepts the formats MPEG 2 and MPEG 4.

The adjustments that work best for the Web are as follows:

- Size of film: Today 240 X 180 should be a minimum and it seems not very useful to go beyond 640 X 480. The “average” format on the Web is of 320 X 240.

- Frequency: 15 images a second at least, 25 images a second at most, 20 is a good compromise. Do not modify the frequency of the original video. If you do, it can degrade the quality.

- Band-width: For a video of good quality, 360 kbits/s is sufficient (beyond that, the viewer must have a really fast Internet connection to be able to view the video well). For videos with low resolution, 120 kbits/s can be enough (low limit).

- Band-width of the sound: Use maximum 48 kbits/s, except if you have a sound recording of excellent quality and if the quality of the output sound is important to you. For normal quality, 24 to 32 kbits/s, mono, should be sufficient.

Other alternatives to Riva (which remains our best choice “by default”, but which does not support all the “codecs”) are

- Sorenson Squeeze 4 (best quality, the most functions, but expensive and for Speechi, the additional functions are not very useful since Speechi takes care of almost all of them)

- Flash MX 2004 Pro (more complete and more practical than Riva)

- ffmpeg. This is the program which is “behind” Riva. For the “expert” users of Linux only.

In version 3.0, Speechi accepts videos with the FLV format. To summarize, the advantages of this format, usually used in Flash, are as follows:

+ better video quality
+ possibility of carrying out “streaming” with direct access (in other words, it is possible, if you have a video of 3 hours, of going directly to the 90th minute of the video without first having to view the initial 89 minutes).

“We were simply delighted to learn of a way to convert our PowerPoint presentations into flash. We provide online seminars and classes and were wanting something dynamic, with smaller file sizes, and at the same time protecting our content. We have all that and more with Speechi. I recommend this to any group wanting professional grade functionality.”

Pat Garner
President
The Business Institute, Inc.

We have received a lot of positive feedback on the latest v. 3 of Speechi from users and prospects. Most users are glad to see that the “skin” can be customized to fit the organization’s color schemes. More in-depth comments and feedback from users will be posted as soon as they are submitted to us.