E-Learning Heroes - Advice and ideas from the Articulate Community

**ROOKIE ALERT**

I am working on creating an Articulate training module that will have a video presenter walking someone through an existing printed material piece.

• So far, I have discovered that you CAN NOT have a PowerPoint shape on top of a flash video.
• If you try to make the video the SWF in the background of the slide, you loose control of the videos player controls.

I am exploring the option of having our video shot on a Green Screen with a backdrop image that I would provide. I would crop the video to only 1/3 of the slide. I would make the slide background the same image that I had the behind the green screen video, and then I could use the other 2/3 of the slide to place native PowerPoint shapes/text/charts. Does this sound feasible, or am I grossly over estimating how simple this might be?

Any comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Hi Brian and welcome to E-learning Heroes!

Sorry we missed your post--it's a really good question. It's also a topic a lot  of us are interested in but probably don't have much experience with, either.

Couple things. You're right about videos residing on the top layer in Presenter '09. You can, however, layer videos above and below objects using Quizmaker. That might be an option for you since Quizmaker's Slide View and timeline give you a lot more control and flexibility.

When you insert Flash movies (.swf, flv) you can synchronize them with the Presenter's seekbar--assuming the Flash movie doesn't have advanced ActionScript or nested movie clips. If the .swf is a regular movie using the main timeline, it should play and sync with the seekbar like a regular movie.

Here's a good article on some best ways to use Flash with Articulate Studio.

For your video shoot, you could try shooting non-green screen footage to test the cropping and framing requirements.  Presenter's output size is 720x540 so you want to work with that height requirement.

I think your storyboard mockup looks good and planning where fixed items (video) is how I'd set up the templates.

Brian,

I'd go with David's suggestion of using Quizmaker as your development tool of choice due to it's ability to handle layering.

In terms of the video, you could really go one of three ways with this...

1. Forget the Green Screen.  They're really geeky and all, but unless you're confident that you can get a really tight key and not cause

a noticeable drop in video quality, you might find that you're better off shooting against a nice backdrop and bringing the video

directly into Quizmaker and layering your text and other items over the top of the video.

But what fun is that, right? 

2. Green Screen,  If you're going with the green screen, I wouldn't add in a matching background and crop to match the

background image in Quizmaker.  I fear that you'd have a difficult time getting these to match up perfectly and not be noticeable.

If you can get a nice clean key (say, with keylight in After Effects), I'd just bring in your talent with a completely transparent background

and then layer that over your Quiz Maker background.  Or...

3. You could use the Green Screen, Key your footage, add the background, output that video, and then bring it into Quizmaker.  Thereby saving yourself the need to worry about the background image in QM.

Either way, I might suggest that you use comp settings of 720x540 in your video editor and place your talent on the left edge. This will keep things simple and give you the confidence of knowing where your talent is on the screen.  Just make sure that if your talent gesticulates a great deal, that if you want their entire body on the screen, that you leave room for their right arm to move in the frame!

Those are my 2 cents!

Hi Brian and all!

You can shoot green screen and then use a tool like After Effects to create a masked/transparent background. The SWF should support alpha channel and will overlay in QuizMaker  cleanly.

Flash/SWF files always have to be on the top layer, but you should be able to see things underneath it.  You can try the same color background, but that negates putting anything in front or back of it...

Take a look at this from a pretty smart guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsiB_6r8f68

Im starting to really delve into the video aspect so this is perfect "newbie" information.  Im hoping some of our wonderful, talented, genius experts here start a Video 101 thread (hint hint wink wink).

Oh yeah and I've also subscribed to the smart guy's YT channel Thanks for the link.

So love this community!

Hi All,

Thank you so much for your input so far. I am stil working on the planning stage of this project, and you have all given me great things to think about. I am still leaning towards shooting the video with green screen, and using it on the native PowerPoint slide, not taking it into QuizMaker to utilize the layers. 

Am I correct in assuming that if it is in QuizMaker its always going to have a frame around it. I am hoping by having the video live in the PowerPoint slide that it will maximize the frame real estate. Is there anyway to get rid of this frame with the SDK?  I am working on securing some video files that I can test out in both Articulate and Quizmaker with an alpha channel to decide which will work better.

I'll keep you guys updated as to how this turns out.