As an introduction, let's talk a little bit about objectives of this presentation. I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the best practices and worst practices that we've encountered in using synchronized media to enhance the learning process. And also, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about providing you with knowledge and resources necessary for you to be able to create your own projects. Sometimes I know at some of these conferences we talk about all these great solutions, but no, actually give you the opportunity to learn how to do some of these things. So I'd like to focus on that today as well.

Here are some of the things that you'll learn in this presentation. We'll talk a little bit about the benefits of online synchronized lectures. We'll talk a little bit about the design process that the Center for Instructional Design does in developing some of these products. We'll talk a little bit about tips in acquisition, tips in authoring, and tips in deploying some of these products. And lastly, we'll talk a little bit about how to author these materials and various different solutions inside of QuickTime. We'll talk about QuickTime Pro, Smile, using Ahrefs tracks, and lastly, Live Stage Professional.

Of course, this whole presentation is brought to you by the Big Blue Q. Very powerful architecture. We really like what's under the hood and what's available for us. Let me talk to you a little bit about BYU. It's a private university in Utah. Currently enrolls about 34,000 students, undergraduates, and admits about 7,000 new freshmen each year.

We also have a continuing education area that hosts about almost half a million users or hosts about half a million enrollments in their distance education and conferences that they have as well. And then there's the Center for Instructional Design, and we build all the online content for both on-campus courses and also for the continuing education area. The Center for Instructional Design also uses students extensively in the development process.

It's a great learning experience for them, and they're very talented people, so we like to leverage the students in the development process. The challenge at BYU, like many other universities, is that we have a very diverse and diverse universities today is that these are tough times and at BYU there's a freeze on building new buildings and expanding our campus that way. There's also a freeze on hiring and opening new positions on campus. Someone has to retire or quit their job to be able to open up a position for someone else. There's also a freeze on student enrollments. We have a cap at 34,000. We can't enroll anymore.

Because of that, we're seeing increasing numbers of applicants that are turned away. Each year that number gets higher and higher, and we're very concerned about that. Also, freshmen are arriving much smarter and expecting much more than in the past. Being able to work with these students, it's just amazing to see how bright they are these days. And they really have high expectations of college.

So we have a challenge. The president has challenged us and challenged the whole university to think of ways that we can accommodate more people on campus. And think of ways that we can improve the student learning experience through technology. Of course, our area takes that very seriously, and hopefully today you'll be impressed with some of the things that we've found.

One of the initiatives that we have on campus to explore that challenge and try to find a solution to that challenge is what we call the hybrid distributed learning model. Basically what this is, is that students spend half of their scheduled class time, instead of in the classroom, They actually learn those lectures outside of the classroom, either at home on a personal computer or in a computer lab.

And then the other half of that classroom experience is actually in the class, where they have face-to-face collaboration with their professor and also with the rest of the classmates and discussion. We try to focus on more personalized things in the classroom. It's been a very interesting experience. An example of using that hybrid distributed learning model is a course called Accounting 200. And this is the solution that they have come up with. It's an online lecture mode. It allows the students, actually, to go through the lesson content. Instead of in class, they go to a computer and get the content from the computer.

It's been a very interesting experience. This particular class enrolls about 1,200 students annually. The professor has worked with the Center for Instructional Design and created about 50 hours of lectures on six CD-ROMs. This is now a commercial product that other universities are leveraging. It took about two and a half years to develop, and it took about six figures of funding to get it out the door.

Here's the kicker. Software requirements. This thing only runs on Windows, basically. There's no Mac OS support, and you have to do a few things to get it to work in Windows XP. It requires Internet Explorer 5 Plus, the Java virtual machine, and Windows Media Player 6.4 to 8. It's not compatible with 9. It also leverages Flash 6 and above. And there's some documents on the CD that use Acrobat Reader.

Let's take a look quickly at some evaluations of this particular product. Did you prefer the CD course lecture format of this course to a more traditional format? This is what the students said of this particular course. "Overwhelming support for this new online experience that the students are using in the classroom." Let's take a look at some more evaluations from this particular course.

For this course, which format do you think would have been better in helping you more effectively and efficiently learn the core exam material? Instead of yes and no here, the yes should say is the CD format, and then the no should be the in-class format. So again, overwhelming support from the students using this class to use the CDs instead of learning the traditional methods of the lecture format in class.

Here's another interesting question we posed for the students. Would you prefer the eight lectures on CD and then never meet in class again? This one's a little different here. We've got most of the students saying, "No, I still want that in-class experience." That sort of validated our premise that this hybrid model of having the lesson content being learned outside of class, but still having that classroom experience, that personalized experience with the professor and your classmates. We think it's a very important aspect in using technology. We don't want to lose that personal experience. Well, let's take a look quickly at some of the student comments.

"It was convenient and flexible," a student said. "I review difficult concepts with Norm, the professor, on my own time. Very flexible. The best reason why I like the CD format is because I can go back and see the lectures over again for clarification." Here's another student. "It allows you to go through at your own pace. If you didn't quite understand something, you can go back. So this way you don't have the problem of the one kid in class always asking dumb questions and wasting everyone else's time." Amen to that.

No questions, right? Okay. Here's some negative comments about this particular product. I have quite a few problems with the technology, and this was annoying to deal with when I had to do a lesson. Another student, it's not quite as easy to study off the CD as it is out of a book.

Sometimes students, there are, you know, the stereotypical student is so technical savvy these days, there are students out there that would prefer not to use the computer in the learning experience. Here's another one. It's hard because you cannot ask a question for clarification. That's very true. Although, in some instances, we've married this with an online discussion area where the students can ask questions.

Here's another one. I was just frustrated it didn't work on my home PC with Windows XP. There's lots of technical issues. In fact, technical issues seem to be the number one problem with these kinds of things. Here's my favorite. Accounting 200 is not Macintosh compatible. This was a major inconvenience. You know, accounting has traditionally been a Windows-oriented study, unfortunately. Although there are quite a few students now that are using PowerBooks and Mac OS X on campus, and we don't want to leave them behind.

Let's talk a little bit about compatibility problems now. This is unbelievable. I just could not believe this. When Windows XP was released, It just drove our department crazy. We had all kinds of technical problems, support issues to deal with in this. So now we have five pages of instructions on getting this thing to play back on XP.

You have to install Reel 1, you have to install all Java applications, and you have to uninstall the Java VM. And then you get to follow a 40-step process. And you have to follow that process step by step or you're going to have to start all over again to get this thing to run.

In hindsight, we simply chose the wrong media architecture for this. It was very obvious to us that using those various products, we just did not create a durable product. So we have a new project inside of CID, the Center for Instructional Design. We need to take a closer look at the requirements for synchronizing lectures on campus. We want to create an ideal solution to easily create cross-platform synchronized lectures.

Now with every project at the Center for Instructional Design, we of course have a workflow, and this sort of outlines what's going on here. The blue boxes on the right are the personnel that's involved in a project, and of course the processes are outlined in the green boxes. So we have faculty consultants on campus that go out and find out the needs from the faculty.

That's our whole job is to find solutions for the faculty and report some of those things back to us. So if a professor has a great idea, like a synchronized lecture, the faculty consultant will work with the faculty to create a proposal. That proposal goes to a governing body called the portfolio management team. And they get to decide yea or nay. They measure that against all the other priorities that we have and the money that we have available. If a project gets approved, it goes through a design process.

At the start of the design process, we have a project team that's assigned. We have a project manager, an instructional architect, an art manager, and also a technical manager that are placed on that particular team. Their job is to come up with a proper design specification. For each project.

And to also work through the production of that particular project. And also conduct usability and quality assurance. Once the project's done and the professor's signed off, there's also an evaluation process that is absolutely critical to ensure that our materials are actually doing the things that they were designed to do.

So here are the specifications, most of the specifications, inside our MediaSync project. We need this thing to be cross-platform. We need full transport control over that lecture. We want to be able to stop it at any point in time. We need to be able to rewind those kinds of controls. We want an index that we can navigate to specific points in the lecture.

We want, of course, sync slides with the audio or video. It needs to be compliant with accessibility standards. That's a very important point. Sometimes it gets neglected. It also needs to have a progress indicator that's scrub-able. That was one critical feature request from the faculty, that some faculty want to be able to scrub and find a specific point.

Let's see, we also need to support our projects. These projects need to support standalone lessons and/or whole courses. It needs to be extensible enough to be able to break things up into components or have one course. And lastly, it needs to deploy on many different delivery platforms, including CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and the web.

Well, that sounds pretty much like a job for QuickTime, don't you think? Some of the advantages of QuickTime include cross-platform support, Mac and Windows, and you can even get interactive QuickTime running on Linux through the crossover plugin. The tricky part there is to get those Linux users to actually fork up some money to pay for the plugin. It's $20. Sorry if I offended any Linux users out there. QuickTime has a track-based architecture, which makes it very easy to be able to repurpose materials and put materials together.

QuickTime has impeccable synchronicity. Basically, for the most part, synchronizing materials in QuickTime is very solid. Occasionally, we've seen some hiccups now and then, but for the most part, it's very good. QuickTime has a long history of CD-ROM and web video solutions. There's all kinds of CD-ROM applications out there that are leveraging QuickTime. This is a big one for us. We wanted to support a single plug-in, not a half a dozen different applications that all could be a point of problem. We want a single plug-in.

Now let's talk a little bit about some disadvantages of QuickTime. The dreaded install. That seems, at least from the administrative standpoint, that seems to be a big barrier. What we found is that students, that's not much of a big deal for students. For the most part, students don't have questions about the install.

They're used to installing a lot of different products on their machines. There are a few barriers for getting the install process completed. One is on Windows, especially Windows 2000 and XP. You need to have administrative access to the computer to make the install. And sometimes when a student is using a colleague's computer, they might not have administrative access.

So occasionally, we need to help people, we need to help step people through the process of the install. This one's actually a bigger one. And that's the dreaded NAG screen. We get calls all the time about this, asking us, do we have to buy this upgrade? Sometimes it can be difficult.

Also, there are limited authoring tools available. In fact, we've been searching quite a few. There's just a handful of tools that really do a nice job with synchronized lectures and putting those together. We wish there were more. And lastly, it's kind of hard to find some use cases out there. There are a few that are popping up here and there now. But we couldn't find a lot of use cases on using QuickTime for synchronized lectures.

So we decided to kind of forge ahead and try to figure out what we could do with this architecture. So here's the process that we've kind of figured out on creating synchronized lectures for ourselves. We need to acquire the slides, of course. We go in and capture the audio and video of the professor.

We synchronize those slides to the audio or video. We add We add a caption. Again, the accessibility issue is very important to us. We add an index, an index that we can navigate to, and then we prep those files for deployment. Let's talk quickly about some tips in each one of those areas.

Of course, When we receive those slides, we need to convert those into something that QuickTime can support. And that's very easy to do for us because QuickTime supports all kinds of standard image formats. Perhaps our favorite these days, depending on the image format, is probably PNG, but depending on the case, GIF works as well. So does PICT and JPEG.

If you're using PowerPoint, this is an important one, export your PowerPoint slides to still images on the machine that it was authored on. And the reason for that is that when you export those slides, it's leveraging the fonts, right? So you want to make sure if you were to - we run up against this all the time. And that is the PowerPoint slides were authored on a PC. We take it in and put it on a Mac.

And of course they're using all kinds of different fonts. And so when we export it on the Mac, the spacing of the fonts are very strange and all kinds of weird things are happening. So that's just a tip to make sure you export. Here's another tip. You can actually on the Macintosh, if you export as picked, it will render those files, some of those files as vector based and it will actually go grab the font and display it inside that still image. And so for Macintosh, if you export as picked, then you want to make sure that the people who are using your product also have that font. To keep things simple, again, we usually use ping.

Okay, here's some tips for, some basic tips for capturing the audio video. Use your tripod, of course. When you're jiggling around that camera, you're wasting all kinds of pixels in the compression. Just keep it simple. Also use a lavalier or a close mic. You get a nice, strong audio signal that's very important. You need to prepare the lighting. In fact, we strongly recommend that you go into a classroom or wherever you're shooting this material and scope out the lighting. Sometimes lighting is absolutely horrendous, and that can just throw all your video signal out the window.

Captured to tape. We've investigated capturing straight to a PowerBook or other computer. Sometimes there's little tiny glitches, and you want to make sure that you have that source material so you can reuse that again. We strongly recommend that you use tape, even if you are trying to do some live capture and live compressing.

Pre-processing and compression, of course. We like to use Squeeze, Cleaner, and now there's Compressor as well, a part of Final Cut Pro. They're all very good tools to be able to crop your video, de-interlace it, and compress it into the bandwidths that you need. Alright, have the instructors repeat the questions. That's another very important issue. A lot of times students will be asking questions and we just don't have the microphones out with the students, it's just with the professor. So have the professor repeat those questions so it's audible on the tape.

This one's sort of a preference. We really prefer to have a formal recording session with the professor. Again, we can get the lighting done right, we can get the sound right, and there's not all kinds of distractions. You know, sometimes that's not very practical, but if at all possible, we like to bring them into a small little studio and shoot them that way instead of in the classroom.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about indexing. Of course, each slide's going to need a time stamp, right? So here's a few ways that you might be able to do it. This is a low-tech way, and it actually works pretty well. And that is just having a student assistant in the classroom, and as the professor's moving the slides around. Have the student notice what time it is and mark it down on a sheet. We can take that information. We've had some Apple scripts and some other technologies that allow us to easily synchronize those materials in.

High-tech includes Live Stage Professional. Live Stage Professional 4 now has a synchronizer, and I'll show you a little bit here shortly on how to use that synchronizer to synchronize the slide materials with audio or video. And there just may be some other tools coming out here shortly that might be available that can facilitate this as well.

Creating the caption. How do you create a caption, right? Well, with a caption, the low-tech solution is to have the word processor and your word document or word processing document up. And as you listen to the transcript, you can pause it, do a command tab, go right to the processor and type it in. Anyway, that's the low-tech solution.

HiTech is, of course, Magpie. Can't really see your hands out there, but how many have used Magpie before? This is a free tool from WGBH that runs on Java, so it runs on Windows and Macintosh. It's an excellent tool to create captions with. And again, it's free. What's nice about it is it allows you to control the audio and video while you're typing in the caption. And then after you're done, you just choose export, and it exports to all kinds of different formats. It's a very good tool. So I would strongly recommend to go check it out. Check it out. Here's the URL to that particular product.

There are also other tools that are available out there. If you go to Version Tracker and type in QuickTime caption, you'll find all kinds of different tools that allow you to do that. One other issue here, one other nice thing, QuickTime captions aren't only for the deaf. QuickTime captions can also be searched. I don't know if you knew this, but in the Pro version of QuickTime, there's a search feature. We'd certainly like to see that available for the free version.

In fact, We'd like all of you to go ahead and submit a request to Apple to make that search feature available for the free version. This could be very useful, especially in an education setting where a student remembered something from one of the lectures but can't really find it. They could just pull it up and search through the caption. It would be very useful.

You can also do this with Wired Sprites, but unfortunately there are some issues there still with searching the caption through Wired Sprites, and hopefully those will be fixed here shortly. All right, creating the interface. This is really simple. Just make sure that, you know, it's in an image format that QuickTime supports. And I would strongly recommend that you leverage layers, and I'll show you that here shortly, on creating an interface.

All right. We need to create a navigable interface. And to do this, we can leverage chapter tracks. If you think about it, QuickTime has these chapter tracks that allow you to jump to specific points. And it's really nice because it always shows you what chapter you're on, right? And when you need it, you can click on it and navigate to the right one.

There's quite a few different ways you can create chapter tracks. One is using Apple Script, and I'll show you a demo of that here shortly. There's also Go Live and Live Stage Pro. You can also make a visual index as well by using Flash or Live Stage Professional.

Alright, to put it all together, again we have many solutions here. So here comes the fun part. Let's show you some demos here of how you can author this stuff right inside of QuickTime Player Pro. You know, it's $30. What can you do with QuickTime Pro? So here's a demo. I'm going to transfer to this other machine right here.

Great, here we go. So here's a demo that we're gonna create, all right? This is a professor. Here's the Accounting 200 professor. Great. And this particular... Let's go over these questions reflected here in this first problem. The first one was, why is accounting sometimes referred to as the language of business? Great.

So we have the video and the audio and the slides, and the slides are synchronized, of course, to the audio. We also have the caption track down here. If I wanted to search for something, let's see, they've changed this. It used to be Command-F, right, for find. Now it's Command-R for whatever reason. Let's see.

I think, since this is accounting, I think he talks about investing or something. So, when I search for invest, I found, it found investors right here. And let's see, if I go under edit, I can choose find again, and it'll find that again, and I can just kind of go through the whole piece and find all the different excerpts that he's talking about, invest, whatever is related to investing, right? So, pretty slick. Also in this particular chapter, In this particular project, it has a chapter track, right? And as this thing is going, this thing will update and let me know what topic I'm on as I'm going through the project or going through the lecture.

Sorry, I'm going to turn this back up. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to do that. Okay, let's go through the process of putting this together in QuickTime Pro. 30 bucks, pretty cheap, huh? Here we go. We've got our development folder here. And what I'm going to do, here's the video. We actually shot this and compressed it in MPEG-4.

And the first thing I need to do is I need to - I'm going to synchronize the slides with the video. Okay, so to do this, I'm going to take my slides, and again, we've exported the slides out from PowerPoint into - excuse me, GIFs. I'm just going to - I'm going to drag select all of those, come down here, and I'm going to pop it up inside of QuickTime Player, all of those single images, okay? Here we go. Great. All right, I'm going to move the video file over here.

So I can take a look at it. I'm going to start with slide one. I'm going to copy that. Okay, and then I'm going to close it. All right, now over here with the video window, I'm going to hold down the shift key, and I'm going to hit play.

And while this thing is playing, you notice that these little sliders here will start to move, and it'll start to select a piece of the video, right? So here we go. I'm going to hold down the shift key. Let's go over these questions reflected here in this first problem. The first one was, okay, that's the first part of the slide. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add that slide that I copied straight to the video right here by using add scaled.

And what that does is it actually adds that slide to the selection that I selected, the piece that I selected. Okay, now what I'm going to do is if I type command B, it's going to move those selectors to the point where I just stopped, right? Okay, now I'm going to go back to slide two.

Copy that, close it out so I don't have to worry about that again. And I'm going to continue by holding down the shift key and playing... Why is accounting sometimes referred to as the language of business? Okay, that's the next slide. So, now I can use addScale again.

If I hit the back arrow key once, this is going back one frame, and there's my slide. Now, this isn't visual, right? But it's still available, and it's still totally possible to do this. We found it in very short projects. This is actually a lot faster than some of the other things that we've found.

So after you go through the whole piece and synchronize those slides up, just using addScale to put all those together, the next thing we need to do is we need to add an interface to the back of this. To do that, I'm going to hide this for just a sec. I'm going to go back, and I created a background image. Now, this was just created in Photoshop and then saved out as a PNG.

Here it is. All I did is I created a region for the video, I created a region for the slides, and I created a region here for the transcript, right? And it's just a still image. So I'm going to copy this to the clipboard. Back to my slides here. This time I'm going to select the whole piece. So I did a Command-A.

And then I'm going to use add scaled again. And it added the interface to the whole length of the lecture, right? Now, as you can see here, I don't see the video and I don't see the slides. And the reason for that is that when you paste a new material, when you paste new material inside of QuickTime, it always puts that to the front. And we need to move some layers here. So to do that, you go under the Movie menu, down to Get Movie Properties.

Here we can have a listing of all the different things that have been added to this movie. We have a soundtrack, and these two files here are actually associated to the soundtrack because it's AAC audio. Here's a video track, and then these two video tracks here are the first two slides that we added, and then this is the last video track. This is actually the background image. Sometimes it's helpful to go ahead and select one of those images and rename it. And to do that, you just go to the General tab and choose Change Name. This is the background. Whoops.

Great. All right, what we need to do with the background is we need to actually put that in back of our video and all of our slides, right? So to do that, just come under the layer area of QuickTime Pro, and what we need to do is back this off and give it a high number. Negative numbers go closer to your eyeballs as you're seeing it, and higher numbers go further back into the layer.

So there's, we put that on layer 12, that ought to be enough. And you notice that the video instantly popped up. If we actually go to the very front of this video, now we have our slides showing as well. Now let's see, the slides are kind of in the corner here, and what we want to do is we want to put the slides in the slide area.

Well, you could actually go through every single slide and move it to the right area, or we found that if you just move the background, and to do that, you just move to the size property for the background and choose, and click the adjust button, that will allow us to drag the background to the area where we want it to go.

Okay, here we go. So we're just about there. How's that? Now we have all our slides. You could have 50 slides in there, and you didn't have to move them all. You just moved the background. Okay, so we're done with moving the background around. Now what we need to do, we should probably take a good look at moving the video into that window. And so to do that, I've selected the video track.

I'll click on the adjust again, and there it is, hiding behind that slide. I'm just gonna click on that and move it around. Now, you gotta be careful sometimes if you click one of these sides, whoa, "Sometimes it won't refresh as much. Also, you can skew it. Hey, it'll play great that way too, but the professor doesn't like that." Okay, here we go.

So that's about where I want that. Okay, so let's just play it and see how it's going. Let's go over these questions reflected here in this first problem. The first one was, why is accounting sometimes referred to as the... Okay, let's add a caption to this, right? Just like I addressed earlier. Let's see. Here's what the caption looks like.

QuickTime has a text-based format for text tracks. You don't actually have to author that inside of QuickTime. In fact, this is just a BBEdit text file, and there's some markup language - sounds familiar, like HTML or something - that allows you to actually specify what's going on with this text file.

And so here we specified the size, what font we want to use, the justification. It's all available inside this text file. So what we like to do a lot of times, if it's a pretty short piece, we'll just open up our word processor. And then we'll go back to QuickTime Player. We'll play the song. Well, accounting is a language. Well, accounting is, or something. And we'll just come back and we'll type that in. Well, accounting is, you know.

And then we'll command tab back to the piece. Business, because accounting seeks to provide. Okay, accounting seeks to provide. And you just go and write your transcript that way. Usually once the transcript is done, then we'll go back another time. And this time around, we'll open up our little properties window again. Amen.

And then in here, if you go down to the time property, it'll show you what time that you stopped on. So let's see, let's go over these questions. Let's say we wanted to use that as our caption for this particular segment. You'll notice that this ended at 4.03, four seconds and three frames. So now I can come back here and I can add that timestamp here to, well, let's go over these questions. Okay, so that was 4.03. So I just go ahead and type that in and just keep going down the list.

Magpie actually does a much better job. You don't have to worry about all the time stamps and stuff. So once you get that done, you'll have a movie. It's ready to go. I'm just going to open that up in QuickTime Player. Here's our movie. I'm going to choose Select All and copy it.

Close it out. I'm going to go to the front of this movie. And this time, instead of Add Scaled, which would scale that video clip to the length of this movie, I'm going to use Add instead. And what Add does is Add just adds it as a separate track.

So now I'm not scaling. I want the synchronizing nature of that text track to be absolute. So I don't want to use add scale. I just want to use add. So now you can see that our text track is actually at the very top here. We need to move that down. So again, I'll go under movie, go down to text track. This time, I'll go down to size, and we're going to just move that text track down into the spot that we created in our graphic for the text track.

Great, look at that. All right, looking good. OK, so now we have video, we have synchronized slides, we have the caption track that's already put in. Now let's add some interactivity. Let's add that chapter track. Now the easy way to do this, the least expensive way, is actually to use Apple Script.

If you go to the AppleScript website, there's a place where you can download a set of AppleScripts just for QuickTime. And when you install those, and I believe with Mac OS 10.2, you also need to install the... You also need to install the script menu, which is available right here. Now, this is very interesting.

There we go. Okay. Once you install that, you get the scripts. And in the scripts menu here, there's what we call QuickTime Player Scripts. And what we want to do is inside the QuickTime Player Scripts is a chapter area where you can actually create and edit chapter tracks just inside of Apple Scripts.

So here what we want to do first is we want to create a chapter track in this particular QuickTime movie. So if we create that, we need to pick the track that we want to synchronize this thing to. And usually that's good to either use the soundtrack or the video track.

Go in and create it. You notice down here now, in the bottom right-hand corner, we have a start menu. That's the first entry for our chapter track. Now, as we go through this piece, Let's go over these questions reflected here in this first problem. The first one was... Okay, I'm going to back that up a little bit.

Here's another trick for you. If you hold down the command key and type the left arrow, it'll play this thing backwards. ...reflected here in this first problem. I think about right about there I want my first chapter listing. And so what I do is go into the scripts menu, go to QuickTime Player Scripts to Chapters, and I want to add a chapter at this current time. So, Shazam! I'm going to go ahead and name this.

Let's see, let's see... Thank you. Okay, great. Now if we notice here, we have a start menu, and when I select that, it goes to the start. And if I choose Shazam, thank you, it jumps exactly to that spot. So here's a nice, low-tech way for you to be able to create a synchronized lecture right inside of QuickTime Player Pro.

Excuse me. OK. Let's go back to slides, please. You like that? Great. OK. Let's talk a little bit about href tracks. Here's another technology you can use right inside of QuickTime that the video is actually controlling some web pages. And you can do it this way as well. And so, back to the PowerBook. I know these guys in the back, they're really nice to me. I'm driving them crazy here. Okay, so let's look at hreptracks and how we could put this together. Let's show you a final product here.

This is what an HREF track lecture looks like. Let's go over these questions reflected here in this first problem. The first one was, why is accounting sometimes referred to as the language of business? Now with this one, we've got that all familiar chapter track here, and I can jump to a specific spot. And you notice when I go to that area and I'll hit play here, it will continue to synchronize those slides.

"We've got a frame here for the video. We've got a frame here for the content." But if you're going to try and make an intelligent, informed decision, you better get some information. At least understand something about the company that you're investing in, looking at what its current financial position is. So here's another way that you can use QuickTime to be able to control lectures. So let's go through the development process of how you can put these together. And to do this, you need to use Go Live.

So let's go through a project here. I'm going to open up the index file really quickly and give you an idea of what this looks like. So first I have an index file and in here I have specific frames, right? I have a frame for the video, I have a frame for the content, and you could also have a frame for navigation. We probably won't deal with that today, but we'll just deal with these two frames here. So in the content frame, of course, you've got whatever your first slide is.

And again, what makes this nice is that you can go into PowerPoint and say, "Hey, export my slideshow as a web page," and it'll automatically create all those web pages for you, right? Another nice thing about this particular solution is that web pages can be extremely lightweight, much lighter than graphics. So if you're just using text or leveraging cascading style sheets, this can be a very good solution.

Okay, so there's the content window. Let's look at the video window. Again, we've got this QuickTime movie embedded into a web page. Now, some of you may not know that Go Live has a very good QuickTime editor in it. If I double-click on this video... It's opening up my QuickTime movie inside of Go Live. And if I click on this Show Timeline Window button, it actually opens up a timeline. Here's a timeline of my QuickTime movie. Now let's add some additional interactivity to this particular QuickTime movie.

I'm going to move my palette over here. If you slide your object's palette over one, there's a hidden QuickTime palette there that has all kinds of cool things you can add to QuickTime movies. We're going to add two things. First, we're going to add a chapter track. So if we just drag that chapter track icon down there, it creates a chapter track.

And if you select on the chapter track name-- let me just move this inspector over a little bit-- it gives us the opportunity to change the name of the track, if you'd like. And it gives us kind of a timestamp of what's going on. If you select the sample, which is down below, this is where you can actually create your chapter track. So we're going to start with Start.

And then you can play it down here. And it'll actually play the video. Questions reflected here in this first problem. The first one was-- OK, so right about there is our first, where we want our second chapter track. So to create an additional chapter listing, you can just come under here under this Divide Sample, go over here and just click in this area. And now it's created a second sample.

Here we can, let's see, this was Shazam, right? Great. And you can just go through your whole piece and create a chapter track going through all the different areas, right? Okay, now here's how you would create that href track. This icon here is for href tracks, and it's very similar. So here, let's see, whoops, we'll have to back it up here a little bit.

There we go. But this is almost the exact same process. First, you come in here, and if you were to select the href track, it gives you the opportunity to type in a... A URL to wherever that slide is contained. And this is very important. This target area, if I were just to leave this link alone, what would happen is as that QuickTime movie hit that first href listing, it would actually replace the movie. What we need to do is have the content be replaced in that content window.

And so if you click this button here, it kind of shows all the different frames that you have in your initial web page. And we actually named our content window the content, so we'll use that. And then this is the other important parameter you need to select, and that is auto load. What that means is as this movie is playing, and when it hits that new href track, it's going to auto load that web page in the content frame.

So just make sure that's selected. Now once you have the first one selected, you can go through again. And a lot of times you find that the slides are actually synchronized with the chapter track, which is synchronized with the HREF track. So I can see visually right here in this area right here where Shazam starts, I can just line that right up, go to my divide tool.

Divide it up and then rename that to slide two. Great, and I can just keep going linear, I can just go down the, linearly, wow, go down the whole QuickTime movie and just chop it up as I go. So that's basically using an Ahrefs track. All right, let's see. Let's go back to slides.

Okay, so we've talked a little bit about QuickTime Player Pro. We've talked about href tracks. Now let's talk about Smile. How many of you have used Smile before? Okay, a little bit, a handful. Okay, Smile of course is a markup language, right? A lot like HTML, except that it has a time parameter. And QuickTime is actually a nice player for Smile. And so now we're going back, and I'm gonna show you how to put something together in Smile. Here's what a SMILE lecture looks like inside of QuickTime.

Let's go - okay, the question was, why do you use Smile? Well, Smile allows us to keep the content separate from the programming language that's behind it, allows us to easily repurpose things because Smile is a text-based format. So we've got databases that can render our Smile files on the fly really easily. Just allows us, since it's text-based, to really easily edit what's going on. And you can see in this particular example that we have some additional functionality, and that is we have this text-based navigation sitting right on the screen.

Sometimes students like to see that, kind of see what's going on, what they can anticipate a little bit. So you notice also that we still have our chapter track here, which is something that's totally supported inside of Smile. Let me show you what the back end of this thing looks like, okay? Oh, I just have to prove to you that I can actually click through some of these. And okay, great. So let's open this up, and I can kind of show you what's going on on the back end.

It's this presentation Smile file here. Okay, so there's different components inside of Smile file that you'll need to be aware of. The first part here at the very top, it's is Smile specific, and then QuickTime specific parameters when you open this up. For example, I've set autoplay to true, and I said, "Yeah, I want a time slider at the very bottom." And immediate instantiation means that everything gets downloaded at once.

And then I also have chapter track listings here, and there's different modes of putting up the chapters. Anyway, after that, we have the header section, just like a web page, right? And in the header section, we have metadata that allows us to name the title of the movie, so when you open this thing up, it actually displays that name. We can put author and all kinds of different annotations in here as well.

In the layout area, this is the area that we get to specify what content gets displayed in what area of our lecture. And so you'll notice here that we've got an area for the backdrop, which includes the whole dimension of the movie. We've got a region just for the video, it goes in the top left-hand corner. We've got a region for the slides, of course, and we have a region for the transcript. Now the navigation, that text navigation that you saw, is a little bit more tricky inside of QuickTime.

What we ended up having to do is go ahead and specify a region for every single line, and the reason why we had to do that is that you want each line to have an anchor tag or some way to click on it and do something, right? And so we had to break up, unfortunately, the text there.

Fortunately, it is text, and it's pretty easy just to go ahead and add copy and paste and put those down in, or use a database and extrapolate these materials. Okay. So we've got a lot of text here. Okay. materials together. So, also, there's a little tiny dot that tells us, you know, what topic that we're on. And so, again, we had to break that up into separate portions.

Finally, we get the body of - this is the content of what you're seeing on the screen. And you'll notice here that we have the image source, which is the background, and it's actually associated to the region that's called backdrop. And so this is where you get to take the content and tell it what region you want to put it in, right? This "par" tag here means that anything inside these tags is going to be parallel, meaning that it's all going to play together at the same time.

You'll notice down here, after we put in the background, and the video, and the transcript, which all should be playing at the same time, we have a sequence tag. And what that sequence tag means is that we're actually going to start playing these things in sequence. We're going to add a timestamp to it, and that's where the slides are displaying at those particular times, right? In fact, after that we have another parallel tag, and we're actually showing the slides and that little pointer at the same time on the window.

So basically, that's a smile file. Down here is our navigation, and here's We're actually using QuickTime text. You notice here's the QuickTime text markup language that we're using to embed that in there. So it just reads the QuickTime text. Unfortunately, Smile is a standard, of course, right? And there's different players out there that can play Smile files. The problem is that each Smile player leverages different video and audio formats.

So it's very difficult to create something that's compliant with all the different products. And this is case in point. The text here is QuickTime-specific text, unfortunately. So let me just show you that one more time and show you the functionality of that. So again, here's the metadata that's showing the title of the window. We've got, we can navigate through the different areas here.

That particular smile file was created in BBEdit. I've actually found that GoLive does a pretty good job of, once you've created the initial framework, to bring it into GoLive, and it'll mark up the text with colors. It makes it a little bit easier to deal with some of the things there.

We're actually investigating and using some web applications to create some of these things, being able to author some things to the web, pull it up, grab timestamps, throw it in a database, and then output the whole final product just from a web database. I'm not quite there yet, wouldn't be able to show you that today.

The possibility is totally there. All right, let's move on. Now we're getting to some things a little bit more exciting. Let's take a look at Live Stage Professional. How many of you have had the opportunity to take a look at Live Stage? OK, oh good, we've got quite a few here.

That's good. Live Stage is an authoring tool specifically focusing on leveraging the interactive nature of QuickTime. There's all kinds of really cool APIs on the back end of QuickTime that allow for interactivity. And so Live Stage will allow you to create a synchronized lecture with all kinds of enhancements that we haven't been able to do before.

So without further ado, Here's an example of a synchronized lecture done inside of Live Stage. Again, very similar to what you've seen before, except that this time around we have mouse overs on our navigation index, and we also have the cursors changing to a hand, which sometimes makes a lot of sense to have. It helps the students out knowing that, "Hey, this is really a button." So again, if we just start this off, Financial Accounting seeks to provide information to students.

The last question was, what is GAAP or GAAP? Well, GAAP is Generally Accepted Accounting. Great, you get the idea. How many of you have used the synchronizer inside of LiveStage? We got crickets. No, we got two or three here. Great. Well, Live Stage 4 has this new feature called the synchronizer that will allow you to synchronize these materials right inside of Live Stage. Let me show you how to do that really quickly here.

Alright, to do that we need to create - I've kind of got a shell here. I've already got my video and I've got my - you can see all the tracks are listed. I've got video, I've got the sprite track, which is the sprite that's displaying exactly what topic that you're on. And that gets changed through time.

I've also got the navigation, right in this area. That's a sprite track of course. And those are using separate images to swap in and out as you use the mouse over. I've got my text caption and soundtrack, and here's my soundtrack. What I first need to do is go ahead and I need to create a new picture track. So here's my picture track, and I'm going to call this "Slides".

Great. I'm going to delete that out there. OK. Now if I go down and I select the sound portion-- you'll need to use the sound when you're synchronizing this stuff. If you just select video, it's not going to select anything. Oh, let me back up. One last thing. Before I do that, I'm going to select the sprite track. I'm going to move my slides over to this area here. And I'll just resh-- Change the dimensions so it matches my slides. There we go.

Great. So now if I select the soundtrack, I come up under the movie menu and go down to media synchronizer. Pulls up this window. It already has the soundtrack that I had selected. And right now the sync source is set to background. What I want to do is set that to slides. Now if I go over to my library, in my local library, I have a folder full of slides.

If I grab all those slides, bring them down, just drag them down, and I'm going to go over to my library. Drag him into that window. Oh, sorry, one last thing. We need to be on edit mode, I believe, and we'll just drag those to the window. Okay. One last time. Well, let's see. I must have forgotten something. Anyway, let's try this real quickly.

Interesting. Well, demo gods are not with me today. I know that there's a way you can add all of those slides at once. And then from there, you can set the endpoint on the first one, and it'll automatically start the audio clip. And as you go down through the whole section, you'll be able to set the out point of that particular slide. And you can just keep going down with your slides as you're listening to the content. Makes it much easier to put these materials together. Paul, apologize for that. Okay, let's just continue on with slides.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about deployment options. Of course, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM are our number one choice right now. Seems like a lot of students still don't have broadband at home, if you can believe it. So CD-ROM seems to be our best solution so far. Also, there's, of course, progressive web download.

Just throw these synchronized video clips on a web server, and students can grab them from there. Also, there's real-time streaming. We can actually put the video and audio on a real-time streaming server and deploy these lectures that way as well. So let's talk a little bit about some tips for CD-ROM and DVD-ROM development.

There's actually a couple different ways that you can put these materials on a DVD and deploy them. The first one would be to actually embed all of these materials in web format. So a lot of times, to avoid that NAG screen, we'll put all these materials in on web pages and create a web interface and then burn that to our DVD or CD.

There's an application out there for Windows that allows you to actually auto-launch a web page, and it's called Shellout that we found to be very useful. It's free, and here's the URL that you can grab it from. What this allows you to do is, on Windows, it'll automatically launch your initial web page so the students don't have to go searching around on their hard drive trying to find this thing. It's a very good product that we've found to be very useful.

Of course, when you're building web pages, you want to build in some kind of QuickTime checking mechanism to make sure that they might - make sure that the end user has the right version of QuickTime. And there's various solutions out there. If you're using Live Stage, this is a very good tutorial on using QuickTime checking routines for the web and also for QuickTime Player.

You can also deploy your materials just through QuickTime Player itself. In fact, Live Stage 4 now has a deployment tool that you can just select from the file menu saying, export this to CD-ROM, and it uses this Kickstart program to actually automatically check to see if QuickTime is installed on the client's machine, and if not, it'll launch the QuickTime installer that you've licensed from QuickTime and put on the CD. It's quite a slick setup. We really like that. There's some custom solutions, too. We've been investigating Runtime Revolution, which is an excellent product that could do the very same thing. Other products are available for director-type applications as well. Let's talk a little bit about web development.

A lot of professors really prefer this method because it's so flexible, right? They can easily submit changes. The students can download these lectures and burn them CD if they wish. That takes that cost of creating those CDs away from the professor, and for students it's not a big deal, right? It's also possible to prevent downloading. Some professors are very concerned about students ripping off their materials and not letting them use them. Inside a live stage, of course, there's a technology there that allows you to prevent downloading of those QuickTime lectures online.

We have real-time streaming deployment. This is a little bit more technical. It does allow for instant access, and so if you have a lecture that's an hour long, and you'd like the students to be able to get to the, you know, 45 minutes into the lecture without having to download the initial portion of that QuickTime lecture, real-time streaming is a good solution for you.

Real-time streaming is a little more sensitive to bandwidth issues. It's not quite as forgiving. You know, if on a downloadable QuickTime movie, the QuickTime movie will pause and allow you to wait until you have more of the movie downloaded. With real-time streaming, you know, the QuickTime movie is trying to drop packets like crazy if you don't have enough bandwidth, so you get a lot worse experience.

Okay, and of course, real-time streaming isn't quite as portable because the video and audio reside on a real-time streaming server, and the slides, text, and graphics need to reside somewhere else, either on a CD-ROM or a web server. So it's not quite as flexible. Again, most professors enjoy having it as one package that they can just move to a CD or the web or on their hard drive, wherever they need it. So, we're just about done. In the spirit of Apple presentations, there's one more thing that I want to show you.

Time Scale Modification The human brain can comprehend speech up to 600 words per minute. Some professors can be a little long-winded and a little bit boring. Why not speed up the presentation? This technology has been around for quite some time. In fact, the Accounting 200 course that I talked about earlier has used a product called Enounce that's available just for Windows.

Student feedback has been very positive. First, it requires the students to focus. They're not just watching the video at one speed. They're watching the video at one and a half, two times the speed, two and a half times the speed. The students love this, by the way, because they can just focus and get through the content.

So again, we've had lots of positive feedback from the students, and we've had some negative feedback as well, and most of those are technical issues. You get up to two and a half and, you know, the audio's garbled. It's really hard to understand. It's hard to install, things like that. So, let's do it in QuickTime. Let's go back to the slides, back to the PowerBook, please.

Okay, so here we go. Let's see, in our secret folder we have, We have a lecture here. Let's go over these questions reflected here in this first problem. The first one was, why is accounting sometimes referred to as a language of business? I love that. Well, accounting is a language of business because accounting... All right, let's crank it to two. Here we go. ...that communicates to those who are interested in a business, whether they be investors or creditors or managers, they need information. It's accounting that provides the information that serves as a base for many of these decisions and communicates it.

The second question was, what is financial accounting as opposed to managerial accounting? Again, both of these categories of accounting are involved with trying to provide information. The decision is who they buy that information to. Financial accounting seeks to provide information... Again, all the navigation still works. ...an investor consider an investment in the stock market. Can you get that? You have to focus.

"When you're thinking about making an investment in the stock market, you're trying to find a variety of different companies. You can buy the stocks of a lot of different companies." "Doesn't that seem a little strange, going back to one?" "There's a lot of businesses there." "Great. Alright, so, we've got all kinds of interesting feedback on that. Well, thank you, thank you very much. Back to slides, please." What a great use of technology. Students really, really like speeding up the lectures. It can save them all kinds of time.

And it really requires them to focus on the material. What's interesting about this is that the test scores - first, the test scores haven't changed at all throughout measuring from when they did traditional tests and traditional lectures. They moved it to CD. The test scores didn't change. And now they're using this new method, and the test scores still haven't changed.

What has changed is the time the professor needs to spend in class and the time the student spends learning the materials. So it's been a really fascinating experience. So to wrap up, I think we just have a quick summary here. QuickTime is definitely a viable solution for synchronized lectures. And it doesn't have to cost you a million dollars or whatever. It can be very simple. It can be a very easy solution for you.

There are many different ways, of course, to create them. And we've outlined some of those here. We do need more applications to make this a lot easier. So if you're a developer, think about creating some products for education. This could be one that could be a killer product.

I guess here's some additional programs, sessions that are available. I'd strongly recommend checking out the advanced interactivity in QuickTime. Michael Schaaf's going to be doing that. I'm sure it'll be just a killer session. And all kinds of other interesting sessions on using QuickTime. And let's see. Here we go. Oh, let me back up one.

I got a... This QuickTime alternative programming environment is going to talk a little bit more about Runtime Revolution and some other products that are out there that you can incorporate to make CD-ROM and other interesting things. I'd highly recommend that one as well. So here's some contact information. If you have any questions about this, there's my email address. Feel free to contact me. I'd be happy to share. And then also, Guillermo Ortiz. I see you in the office. He might be here as well to answer some of the technical questions on the Apple side.

And here's some more general information of where you can find some of these things. If you check out the, also the little QuickTime page, I don't know if Judy and Robert are in the audience, but they have an excellent page on updated information on QuickTime. I'll send them a URL where you can check out some of this stuff online. And, oh, more, don't miss some of these other interesting things that are going on. Of course, check out the Content Development Lab and some of the lab hours.