Finally! Video Backgrounds in Microsoft Office PowerPoint [Office 2010]
It’s been the one thing thats kept a lot of churches away from using PowerPoint as their video projection software of choice: motion backgrounds. Previously, you could insert a video on a PowerPoint slide, but you couldn’t show any text on top of it (without weird plugins that didn’t work), regardless of layering. Now, with PowerPoint 2010, part of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite of applications, you can send a video to the back layer on a slide and display text or images on top of it. Though, technically, this is not the background of the slide.
There is, however, one major flaw that will keep this new feature from being truly useful; there’s no way to keep a single video looping through several slides, even if you insert the video into the slide master. In other words, assuming you’ve inserted the same video on subsequent slides, each time you change a slide the video will start over. Therefore, unless your video is looped to the exact time you want to change each slide, there will be a noticeable jump in the video each time you change a slide.
Alternatively, this can be overcome by keeping all the text you wish to display in association with a particular background loop on one slide and make heavy use of custom animations to hide and show blocks of text. This, certainly, becomes very troublesome when dealing with more than two or three “slides” of text, but that could be just enough.
Looking for motion/still backgrounds to use for your PowerPoint slides? Check out my previous post: 100s of Free Worship Backgrounds & Graphics (and videos!)
Update: I found it is possible to keep a video running across multiple slides through the use of video options in the custom animation task pane, however, doing so will cause the video to move to the front, covering any text on the slide. So, while this feature is still useful for video thats inset on a slide, it will not work for full screen motion backgrounds.
Dirpy Replacements [YouTube Downloader]
Dirpy, once a very slick web site which featured tools to download YouTube videos or simply rip the audio from the video, was taken down recently. A suicide message has been left nailed to the door. Was it legal threats? Or did they simply grow weary of playing cat-and-mouse with YouTube? Better question: Does any one care? I’ll venture that most of you don’t; we Netizens are a fickle crowd. We don’t care your blood, sweat, and tears went into something, we just want it to work, we want it to work now, and when it doesn’t work, we’ll just flock somewhere else. Here’s a list of web sites to flock next if you’re looking to rip YouTube videos:
Clip Converter can take uploaded content as well as content from sites like YouTube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Metacafe, Veoh, and more. Output can be audio or video in a variety of formats. This is probably the service which most like Dirpy.
Three-ou-tube? E-o-tube? Either way you say it, just replace the “y” in YouTube.com with the number 3, and you’ll be taken to the 3outube page with links for downloading the video in your desired format.
This site just rips the audio to MP3, but if that’s all you need, YouTube MP3 is dead simple.
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Don’t bother with downloading a piece of software for conversion, especially when you can do it online with no extra download! Plus, they all suck anyway!
Do you know of another conversion web site? Let me know in the comments!
United Airlines Breaks Guitars [And Sucks at Customer Service]
First off, I’m not saying that someone should create a video every time they’ve been wronged, but if the story is compelling enough, and the music is fun enough that it becomes viral, well darnit, I’m okay with that!
Last spring, Dave Carroll of the band “Sons of Maxwell” witnessed baggage handlers from United Airlines mishandling his guitar case resulting in the $3,500 Taylor guitar becoming severely damaged. After a year of United giving him the run around, dozens of phone calls, emails, and letters, they finally said they’d do nothing for him. July 6th, 2009, he posted a music video about the experience on YouTube and on July 8th, United responded. They said they’d pay for the $1,200 repair job. Dave, instead, tells United Airlines to donate the cost to a charity of their choice.
[youtube 5YGc4zOqozo United Breaks Guitars]
The full story is here.
Within 4 days the video “United Breaks Guitars” received nearly 2 million views. Dave has written, and promises to release two more music videos on the subject. What blows me away, though, is the incredible amount of trouble United gives Dave in an attempt to discourage him. Then ultimately, once they find he won’t be disuaded, they dismiss the whole matter. Now, he creates a video, a little bad press, and United comes knocking on his door to make it right.
[youtube T_X-Qoh__mw Statement]
Google TV Ads? Taking Chrome to the Masses
On Friday, Google announced that they will be using their Google TV ads service to place advertisements for Google Chrome on various television networks beginning this weekend. Some time ago, Google put out a call for videos that exemplify Chrome’s unique features. While those videos are doing their viral thing around the web, the video from Google’s headquarters in Japan will be gracing television screens across the nation.
And computer monitors as well.
Saturday morning, while watching Dollhouse on Hulu, I was presented with the aforementioned advertisement. My nerdy excitement was primarily fueled by the fact that I do not subscribe to any traditional forms of television service (cable, satellite), so I thought I’d never get to see the ad, but secondly, I was viewing the ad using the browser in question. (I also got excited when I noticed that all the spiffy computer monitors in the show Dollhouse were the same wide screen Dell monitors I have on my desk. I like the affirmation, alright?)
Though, I’m not sure if Internet Explorer, Opera, or even Netscape in its hey day had entire TV spots dedicated to them, Firefox had a series for select markets back in 2006. Google obviously isn’t giving a lot of details, but their use of the word “networks” instead of “markets” leads me to believe that the advertisements are showing up on, at least, one of the “Big Four.” Chrome has already enjoyed a sizable jump in the browser market share due to hype, Google loyalty, and a massive online advertising campaign, but the company realizes that the majority of users on the world wide web can’t tell Google from MSN or Yahoo, or Internet Explorer from a fish tank screen saver. So, to rope in the technically un-savvy, but technologically curious, Google’s taken it to the ‘tube to sway a group unlike those who will ever read this blog.
According to Google they built a browser out of the goodness of their hearts, using components from today’s best browsers, and in turn, released Chrome as open source. Google’s aggressive push to get Chrome in the hands of users led them to tear the beta label off Chrome in record time (Gmail is still in beta and it’s been around since 2001!). With text, video, and image advertisements all over the web, and now television ads, obviously Chrome means a lot to Google. But, with Internet Explorer finally getting a clue, and the gents over at Mozilla not being the ones to let another browser introduce any feature that isn’t matched and/or bettered, will all this work?
Something I Probably Should Have Thought About [Gmail Pictures]
This is actually pretty stupid of me to do this, but I have to laugh at it. At the end of January, I was forwarded some information I was expected to post on a web site I administer. After sitting on it for awhile, I simply copied the information from the email, and pasted it into the WordPress visual editor. The email contained a photo which, to my surprise, appeared in the post perfectly formatted. Apparently, I thought nothing of this.
Today, I went back to edit the page because I noticed a typo. Often, when you go to edit a page or post in WordPress, the HTML of the content will appear briefly before the TinyMCE visual editor has a chance to load. So, during that half-second, something in the code caught my eye; something about the image. I checked it out, and it seemed that all this time, the photo was being called from mail.google.com. I thought that couldn’t be right; Google isn’t going to play photo host through their Gmail system. But, the picture was there in the editor and the live page. But, wait a minute… I loaded the page in Internet Explorer (I had been using Firefox), and the image was broken. The problem? Whenever I edited or visited the page, I was also logged into Gmail with the same account that the image came from, so the image loaded because Firefox was authenticated while Internet Explorer wouldn’t be.
I should have known better. When you copy and paste stuff on the web (like web-based email), your browser is actually copying the code behind the content you’ve selected. If the image had already come from another web site like Flickr or Picasa, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But, anyway… another day, another lesson learned. 
The Credit Crisis, Explained Visually
Having a difficult time understanding why the economy is upside-down? Check out this video from Jonathan Jarvis which gives a wonderful visual overview of the credit crisis and explains how everything is connected. (Video is best viewed in HD and full-screen, of course.)
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.
Crisisofcredit.com
The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit jonathanjarvis.com.
Support the project and buy a T-Shirt! cafepress.com/crisisofcredit
© Copyright 2009 Jonathan Jarvis
T-Mobile Ge 1
I Will Ask Google Before Asking Dumb Questions
Today’s lesson is a look into phonetic spelling, and the ramifications of including those in your posts! You may notice that the title of this post, “T-Mobile Ge 1″ is meant to refer to the HTC T-Mobile G1 (Android) phone, but the “G” is spelled phonetically. I decided to do this upon a discovery using my G1 after I received the RC-33 update adding the functionality to perform a Google web search by utilizing voice-to-text. When I attempted to search “T-Mobile G1″ it came out as “t mobile g 1,”which gave me pretty much the same results as if I had searched “T-Mobile G1.” This led me to perform searches based off of variations of “T-Mobile G1.” While I searched, Google provided suggestions, one of them being “T-Mobile Ge 1.” Google suggests queries based of off similar terms with relative popularity. I figured if “T-Mobile Ge 1″ appeared in the suggestions, then enough people must be searching it. Plus, once I executed the search, nothing immediately obvious appeared, though, a few blog postings returned based off the occurance of “T-Mobile” and the official site was listed second. So, this post will serve as an experiment to see if people will come here after searching for “T-Mobile Ge 1.” Though, I suspect once the search results are returned, he or she will immediately realize it was spelled incorrectly. But… I shall see!
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