The best way I found to get a handle on Adobe Encore was to send a project to it from Premiere Pro using Adobe Dynamic link. This sets up the majority of project setting from premiere and allows you to see the Encore interface populated rather than a blank canvas.

In Premiere Pro make sure your projects sequence is selected in the timeline. Then choose File > Adobe Dynamic Link > Send to Encore. This will send the project to Encore and create a Encore project.

Once in Adobe Encore you will get to grips with the interface far quicker being able to see the disc, the video and some basic instructions. When you check the project you will get some basic error see here,

Title Remote Not Set
End Action Not set

Quick guide to the windows that make up Encore. For the purpose of this demonstration I have flicked all the tabs / windows to those you will mainly use in the first stages of using Adobe Encore.

Here’s some quickfire settings to get something output to video nice and quickly.

Open Encore

New Project Settings

Trans coding Options

Once you have set up your project you will need to select the video you would like to author a DVD with. Open the folder in Finder containing the video, then under the Flow Chart tab drag and drop your video to the disc image, set your end action and title remote as above and you are set to build the disc.

I’m always watching 4OD on my laptop as I never seem to be in at the tme shows I like to watch are on. For a while now the PS3 has had the BBC iPlayer in the video section of its main menu but after the latest OS update Sony had introduced the 4OD Player (read more) and the ITV player (read more), brilliant! there’s not much you can’t do now on your games console and like most technology shifts at the moment there is no need to upgrade your hardware just your software.

We have also installed an internet enabled TV, the Panasonic Viera in one of the meeting rooms at work and am currently testing with some of the Apps, will keep you posted! isn’t it funny how television moved onto the PC and then back to the TV, just more conveniently!!

I was recently asked to write a piece on Analytics at an intermediate level but this also ties into a stage we have arrived at with some Google AdWords training I’m doing so I’ll explain how analytics can pick up where AdWords left off and also how you can use Custom Reporting to monitor other offline and online marketing efforts.

If you are using AdWords for Business to Business advertising one issue is that data drops off at a certain point as you have no checkout and no price or profit attributed to a click which effectively means no calculation of the Return On Investment. This drop off can be picked up using Analytical software and in particular I shall talk about how we can do this with Google Analytics. The main point to note is that with an end action we can track an entire visitors journey from pre-entry to exit or call to action. With a checkout and a piece of code this purchase price is reported back to your Google Account. The replacement in a B2B case is a call to action and this might be in the form of an email link, request for proposal, click to download etc. As long as the visitor has something to click on then they can be tracked. The long winded process of tracking user journeys if you were using a limited stats package would be to look at the keyword that provided the visitor, tie in the key information that allows you to identify them at different stages of the journey and estimate whether they called to action. With Google Analytics Custom Reporting you are able to do far more. I would recommend using this to track individual marketing efforts and Goals to concentrate on more specific calls to action such as a click on an email link or download. Let’s take your social media efforts for example. You could set up a custom report that tracked all of your social media traffic, the site penetration of each and time on site ie. did they actually stay and read something.

Here’s a step by step guide to such a report,

In the example below I set up a new report, the first Metric I am concerned with is the Pages/Visits, to keep the dimension simple I chose Page Title as I will know exactly the page I am looking at. Once I have established the pages visited I would like to know site penetration so I add Page Views, I next want to establish whether they actually found this page interesting so I add Time On Page, finally I am concerned with where the user left the site so I add Exits.

After creating your report I just want to show you a little hidden extra that gives you a better overview of your traffic. When you look at the report you should see something like this.

This is fine for a top level overview but if you’re keen to delve deeper, click on the Pivot View above the top right hand corner of the table. You will be presented with a chart cross referencing traffic sources, the different Metrics are still available and you can change these with a simple dropdown menu.

You could take this one stage further and apply it to your offline marketing efforts, this is a bit of an eCommerce trick but why not publish an advert in a magazine with a unique URL, a unique landing page that could only be found had the person read the advert.

Many people still search one or two keywords and trawl through endless list of results in a search engine. Beyond the provided filter tools there are many tips and tricks to finding what you want quicker. Ever see the keyword you searched in the summary but arrive at page with 20 feet of scrolling. Hit Control F and search that page for that word and be there in seconds. Use and image search and come across sites that you wouldn’t usually have found.

The bulk of this post is about the little tips and tricks when actually entering text into the search bar.

Phrase search (“”) Use exclamation marks to make more than one keyword a phrase, the results shown will be results where these two words appear next to each other.

Site Search Site search is great for finding something you know appeared on a particular site. Often this search delivers better results that some website own search. Jus type site:thewebsite.com and then the keywords to only search one site.

Filetype Search As per site search but the results are specifically files with the file extension you specify, for example chocolate sweets filetype:pdf

Exclude a keyword (-) No brainer!

Wildcard Search (*) This constitutes anything and then your search term. If you only remember some of what you want to search use the wildcard, for example * sweets results in all types of search with a word then sweets.

Exact Search (+) Means that both your words must appear in the results, for example chocolate + sweets.

I have had a lot of requests for the best way and a simple solution for outputting a Powerpoint presentation to video and what are the limitations in doing so. A few suggestions I had heard in the past was using Picasa, Accoolsoft PPT or Slideshare, I didn’t have much luck with Picassa or Slideshare so I won’t write about them. Accoolsoft on the other hand produced some very nice results and even allowed you maintain transitions, animations with slides and to embed videos in the presentation.

Usually I would do this in the edit suite, PNG a deck of slides and time the transitions to a voice over, sometimes this is not necassary it merely needs to change slide every 5 or so seconds.

Doesn’t like fade to blacks on the video
Doesn’t like the when clicked option when embedding a video into a slide.
Doesn’t like embedded videos when things are deep on a drive.

Procedure

Homepage for the Acoolsoft PPT to Video software, Click add in the bottom left hand corner of the page.

Navigate to the PPT file you wish to convert to video

The PPT is added to the Que click Next to continue

Select the format for the video output file. Quicktime (.mov) is a generic format that will playback in quicktime free player.

Many other formats are available and the paid version of the software opens this up further.

You can also refine the settings for the output video as below.


Resolution = Frame size for the video
Encoder = Video codec
Frame rate = frames per second
Bitrate = increased bitrate improves quality but also increases file size.

Set the transition time between the slides

Advanced settings allows you to alter layout and add background music.

Select the location for the output video and click Start

I was talking to someone at the weekend who does a lot of online shopping but hadn’t heard of Quidco. Nearly every online retailer offers cash back or incentives of different amounts all you need to do is sign up for an account. Quidco takes the first £5 and then you keep the rest, I have earned £122 alone in cashback this year, shopping that I would have done anyway. Once you have an account search Quidco, follow the link to the merchant, at which point a cookie will be dropped and tracks you to the checkout, simple!

Sign up for an account using this link,

i love Quidco GreenWhite

Is it really that scary? no! the biggest hurdle is convincing others its just a communication tool and a very big one at that! in which case we can just apply conventional marketing practices that are right for that particular industries and push marketing messages (simplified) Did we get this confused when we were introduced to email? or the TV was invented? its just a big online communication that the majority of us are using in some form or another…. not just the kids! and not just the techies! in fact you’re probably using social media and don’t even know it!

The other day a colleague, Ryan Garner! you may have heard him on Simon Mayos drive talking about iPad sales (tech expert) no big deal! said he was thinking about digitizing his DVD collection. It got me thinking, it’s about that time that hard drives are so big and compression routines so efficient that we all should start to think about having our films as files. I have a few DVDs as digital downloads and a few I have converted for my iPhone but with 160gb of ps3 hard drive sitting there doing nothing why haven’t I taken the iPod mentality with my DVDs and got them all on a hard drive. So it’s testing time.

I started by looking at the old iPod exports I had done a few years ago but I was after something that wouldn’t look to degraded on a 40″ TV. I remembered having a download available with my x-men origins DVD I bought recently and so download it to look at the file. It was slightly bigger at 8 x but still what would this look like on a 1080 tv, I was optimistic as it looked pretty good in full screen on the MacBook. So the next step was to play it from the PlayStation. No transfer need, see Media Streaming from an Apple computer to a PS3 using MediaLink….  No worries, here to help!

So, next to look at some software, exports settings and codecs. My preferred DVD ripping software is Handbrake on the mac but have a search on Softpedia or Download.com if you are using a PC for alternatives. Handbrake has a few export presets so I tried a few to compare results. When these exports are played back on laptop there isn’t much in the quality although the files sizes can differ dramatically. I exported another targeting the file size to around 700 mb, this produces a very low bitrate and a noticeable reduction in quality. I next produced an export with a targeted bitrate. Many video files on my laptop had a bitrate of around 1500 so I thought it would be interesting to see what file size this produced. The results were a medium size file, approximate 2 gig and a good quality. The test would be though which files I could play through the TV and still be happy with the quality. My opinion is that if you are after DVD quality videos you need to target the 4 to 5 gig file size with minimum compression. If you are happy to notice slight pixelation in your image and funnily enough this occurs on the flat chunks of colour then go-ahead and start reducing the bitrate.

There Is other software and codecs that do the same sort of job, DIVX has a very good compression routine and produces small file sizes in high quality, just make sure you check what file extensions your devices can playback before you compress your entire collection.

Despite ripping me for writing a blog my brother who has been given a yacht to use in the Caribbean for 5 months along with James Martin (kite tester for kiteworld magazine, sponsored rider and male model, no big deal!!) has decided to document their trip by writing their own WordPress blog, Wind Waves and Caribbean Raves. To add an extra dimension and make use of the fact that they have been cross referencing anchor spots with windsurfing, surfing and kitesurfing locations. They wanted to include some kind of map.

So, here’s how to use Google Maps My Maps function to create your own custom maps and embed them in the blog posts, not oly that I will explain how to embed extra media such as a YouTube video into the Map.

Sign into your Google account, under the Google Maps logo in the top left hand part of the page click on My Maps and then Create new map. Give it a title and description, in the edit mode you have the option to draw on the map, drop a pin or grab and navigate the map. I have created a map as an example, using some footage I shot at Gwithian beach in Cornwall the other week I then chose the html option on the push pin and embedded the share code from Youtube.


View
Video Beach Guide in a larger map

I didn’t realise that this was an unknown to many but often there is a need to pull things out of PowerPoint for alternative uses rather than put them in. This is often the case for me when produce video reports where the findings have been visualised in PowerPoint. So, it’s as simple as this, File > Save As > under the naming form fill change the drop down to png or jpg and hit save, you will then be prompted current slide or every slide, choose every slide and each slide in he deck will be saved as a separate picture or image.

If you just require an element if the slide you can right click and save as image in much the same way.

Top tip,
If your output proposed use is a higher quality than the resolution of the ppt you can often scale up your deck to A3, any vector graphics will be re sized and the quality of the output increased. Go, File > Page Setup and adjust the page accordingly.