Introduction

This guide will help distance instructors use Adobe Presenter software.

Adobe Presenter is a useful tool for developing presentations specifically for online distribution using the Flash file format. Once you are introduced to the capabilities of Adobe Presenter you will be able to design, develop and deliver interactive narrated PowerPoint presentations.

In order to use Adobe Presenter to produce narrated PowerPoint presentations you must have a Windows PC meeting the following requirements:

Because of the low quality of built in microphones it is recommended that an external headset microphone be used for all narration recording. Additionally it is recommended that a high-speed network connection be used to reduce the time needed to transfer the large audio files produced through Adobe Presenter.

Because of our license agreement with Adobe, we can only grant accounts to instructors who are currently, or will soon be, teaching an entirely distance or online course. IDDL will need to know the Course Name, Number, CRN, and semester it will be taught, as well as the instructor name and contact information. If you will be the instructor you do not need to provide your contact information again.

Instructors may request an account by submitting our help request form.

Once your account is set up you will receive a confirmation email.

The email will have provide a link to download the Adobe Presenter Software

Please use the following username and password:

User name: VT/PID

Password: VT PID Password

You will be asked to follow the link in the email to download Adobe Presenter. Links are provided for troubleshooting ("Help").

Production: Recording Watch this tutorial (requires Flash) [ High Speed | Low Speed ] Before you begin recording be sure that you have the proper equipment to produce a quality recording. For a review of the necessary equipment please review Getting Started section of the tutorial. In addition to computer setup, you must have an active Adobe Connect account and installed the Adobe Presenter Plugin. To access Adobe Presenter, first open Microsoft PowerPoint. Once you are in PowerPoint, take note of the Adobe Presenter pull down menu.

It is recommended that you do not use the interface provided by the Adobe Presenter software outside of PowerPoint. Using the narration tool built in to PowerPoint allows for easier backup and transitioning should you choose to use delivery systems other than Adobe Presenter.

Setting up Audio for the first time

First, you must go to Preferences under the Breeze menu.

Then you must select the Audio Source tab on the right. The default setting is for Microphone, but you must change to Line-in for the initial setup of Adobe Presenter

Now, choose Close, go back and repeat the following setup. Only this time, change from Line-in back to Microphone.

Click Close and you are ready to proceed to the following instruction. Again, this step is only necessary for the initial setup of Adobe Presenter and will not need to be repeated for each session.

Sorting Your Files

To facilitate data backup, we recommend placing any presentation files you wish to narrate in a new folder with the same name as the presentation file. To do this, open the My Documents folder from your desktop and right click a blank spot in the body of the window. Choose New and then Folder to create a new folder. Type in the name that you wish to use for the new folder (use the name of your presentation). Once your folder is renamed, drag the presentation to the folder.

Setting up PowerPoint for Audio

Once you have opened a presentation in PowerPoint that you wish to narrate, select Adobe Presenter from the PowerPoint menu, and choose Record Audio from the dropdown list.

Set the microphone level

When you select Record Audio a new window will open that will help you set the level of your microphone. It is a good idea to follow the instructions to ensure that your microphone is calibrated to an appropriate volume.

Speak into the microphone, for example using the test message provided in the window, and if the microphone is operating properly, the red box will turn green and say Input Level OK. You can then click OK to start recording your narration.

Recording the Narration

A new window will appear, this is the Record Audio Window.

From here will be able to record the audio/narrations for each slide. Select the slide on which you wish to begin your narration. Do this by using the Previous and Next buttons in the Record Audio window.

If you put notes into your slideshow presentation, you can view them while recording by checking the “View script” box. This is useful if your notes include a transcript of what you intend to add as a narration, so that you can read along while recording the audio. Once you have checked the box, the Record Audio window will expand to include the script text box.

You can paste in notes or type your own script by clicking on the text box, or you can Import Notes from the slideshow by clicking on the Import Notes button.

Press the record button (red circle) and continue speaking until all of the audio for that slide is complete, and press stop (grey square). You can pause in the middle of recording, if you wish.

Pressing the play button (green triangle) will allow you to hear your recorded narration. If you are not satisfied with your audio, you may press record and begin that slide again. If you are satisfied, choose Next to continue to the next slide.

Once you have moved to another slide, the record audio window will be ready to record audio for the slide which is displayed in the background. If you have notes in your PowerPoint presentation, you may check the box that says View Script and then click on Import Notes. You will be able to select and import notes from the current slide or all slides.

This process can be repeated for each slide in your PowerPoint presentation.

Note: You can record the audio for each slide out of order if you wish, and Adobe Presenter will automatically associate the audio you have recorded with the corresponding slide. In order to reduce confusion, it is a good idea to record audio sequentially.

Completing the Narration

Once you have completed adding audio to each slide, you may want to preview your presentation before you publish. To do this, select Adobe Presenter from the Powerpoint menu and choose Audio Editor.

From the View menu, select Slide Show.

If any slide is incorrect, or unsatisfactory, you can edit the slide text and images in PowerPoint as you normally would, and the audio will not be affected. If the audio is incorrect or unsatisfactory, choose Record Audio from the Breeze pull down menu and use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate to that slide. Re-record your narration by pressing the record button. This will not affect other slides or narrations in the presentation.

Watch this tutorial (requires Flash) [ High Speed | Low Speed ]

Publishing requires that you already have prepared a PowerPoint presentation with audio attached to it, and have installed the Adobe Presenter plugin.. Please review the Recording section if your presentation is has not yet reached this point. Additionally, if you wish to publish to a specific Adobe Connect server, you must have an active Adobe Presenter account.

Begin by opening the presentation you wish to publish. Once your presentation is loaded, select Publish from the Adobe Presenter menu.

You will now be given the option to publish directly to your computer, or to the Adobe Presenter server. If you would like to publish directly to your computer, choose the My Computer tab on the left, and specify the folder location for where you would like to have your presentation saved.

Along with the Folder you wish the presentation to be published to, you can also specify the Output Options: if you would like your files to be generated as a folder (default), as Zip Files, or with an autorun.exe file for a CD.

A Settings menu is available on the right side of the publish window, just above the Help button. From there, you can change the title of your presentation, choose whether it will automatically play when a viewer loads the presentation, how long slides with no audio recording will play for, and add any attachments or flash files you wish to include. Press OK when you have finished altering the Settings.

To finish, click Publish at the lower right corner of the main Publishing screen.

If you would like to publish to your Adobe Presenter server, choose the Adobe Presenter Server tab on the left and click Publish at the lower right corner of the screen. While in the past, many instructors had to publish to the server for distribution, that is no longer the case. It is recommended that you publish to your own computer so that you can then upload to Blackboard directly into your course.

Presentation Data Files

The Presenter data for the PowerPoint presentation is saved as a .ppc file (Adobe Presenter Audio File) with the same name as the .ppt file (Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation file), and is saved every time you save the .ppt file.  Keep these two files together in the same folder, and with the same file name.  If you wish to move the .ppt file to a new location, move the .ppc file with it; same with copying the files to new locations. If you wish to rename the files, we recommend opening them in PowerPoint and then choosing Save As to save a new copy of the presentation, to prevent any errors with the files being able to find each other.   If they are separated, the audio, animation timings, and slide settings will not be available when you open the presentation in PowerPoint, or it will result in errors in attempting to load the audio or other Presenter changes. The .ppc files tend to be very large because they contain all of the imported audio and video.

The published file set is different and separate from the .ppt and .ppc files.  The published files do not have to be kept with the .ppt and .ppc files.  You can put your published files on your website, email them, or save them to a CD if you wish. In order to view your presentation, you can click on the View Output button when the publishing process alerts you that it is complete, or you can open the index.htm file in the resulting folder. This will open the presentation in your default web browser.

Do not separate the published files from each other.  These include:

• a “data” folder
• breeze-manifest.xml
• components.swf
• index.htm
• loadflash.js
• viewer.swf

If the option to “Generate autorun for CD” was chosen when published, these files will also be present and should not be separated from the other published files:

• Autorun.inf
• autorun.exe
• Presenter.ico

To see the publishing process demonstrated in a Flash tutorial, you can click here. Now we can move on to the next section on how to distribute your Adobe Presenter presentation.

Watch this tutorial (requires Flash Player ) [ High Speed | Low Speed ]

Related tutorials:

• Creating Executable Zip Files: [ High Speed | Low Speed ]
• Uploading Zip Files to Blackboard: [ High Speed | Low Speed ]

Now that you have published your presentation through PowerPoint, you can make your content available to view online through a web browser. By using web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari, presentations can be downloaded and placed in a website or linked in Blackboard.

Your zipped presentation is now ready to be placed on a website or placed on BlackBoard for student access.

Converting .zip files to .exe

Opening the Adobe Presenter zip file can be rather confusing, since it contains many different files inside. To make things easier for your students, we recommend that you convert the .zip into an .exe file so that the presentation will open automatically.

Before beginning, all of the contents you want in the .exe file must be located in a .zip file somewhere on your hard drive. To do this, use a program such as Winzip to zip up the files, or publish the presentation as a .zip file through the Adobe Presenter publishing menu in PowerPoint.

You can download and install Zip 2 Secure from this link.

1. Open ZIP 2 Secure EXE
2. Click the Browse button next to the text box under “Create self-extracting EXE from:”
3. Browse to the .zip file which you want to convert to a self-extracting (.exe) file.
4. To have the presentation execute upon extracting the file, enter “index.htm” into the text box below “Run this program after unzipping:”
5. Select/check the box next to “Build an EXE that automatically unzips to a temporary directory.”
6. Click the Create button. You will now be able to view your file.

Uploading Zipped Presentation to Blackboard

Begin by opening your browser and navigating to Blackboard. Log into Blackboard by entering your PID and password. You will then choose the course that you are adding your presentation, as well as the location inside the course. For this example, we will add this presentation as a New Item in the Assignments section.

Next, we will name the presentation and give it a brief description.

This next step is one of the two crucial stages that may be new to some users. First, we must browse to the zipped presentation that we have just published in Adobe Presenter. Click Browse to navigate to the .zip file. In this case, the example file is called "PresentationName.zip". Next, we will name the file. Again, we will call this example file "Lesson01". The final part of this step is most important. From the drop-down menu, select "Unpackage this file." Doing so will allow Blackboard to search inside the zipped file and lead you to the second and other crucial stage.

But before we move forward, you know have an opportunity to select the release and available duration of this presentation. Most choose the defaults and for our purposes, we will just leave this section alone. Click Submit to move forward.

This is the second crucial stage--Selecting the entry point of the zipped presentation. Each and every time you add a presentation, you will select index.htm as the entry point for your presentation. After selecting the entry point (index.htm), you can now click Submit.

Blackboard will confirm the success of your action, and upon clicking OK you will be taken back to the BlackBoard course folder you just added the item to.

You may now return to the Contents or proceed to the advanced section on Importing Audio.