‘Famous’ Presentations with Instant Video Presenter

by Darrel Willman

Overland Park, Kansas software company ej4 has introduced a new software package that promises to make video promotions and sales presentations quick and easy. Instant Video Presenter (IVP) is just that—a package with a green-screen and a program that puts you on-camera with your presentation quickly and easily. You hang up the green screen and attach your video camera or web cam to your PC.

We found Instant Video Presenter to be easy to use, and worth the purchase price. It was relatively simple to set up the backdrop and begin recording right away. The included background artwork is diverse and fun, and the software allows you to use images of your own, your desktop, or even video behind you. Considering the work the software does with the simplicity of operation make this one a must-have if you are thinking about doing presentation or sales videos.

ej4 estimates a twenty-minute learning curve for the software, but realistically, it may be around an hour start to finish.

After installing the software, if you’re using the trial version, you’ll need to come up with a blue or green backdrop to use. IVP automatically detects the color and gives you an instant on-screen preview so you can see how the color is dropping out—or not. If you’ve got flecks or speckles in the background, chances are the lighting is bad.

We needed to adjust our lighting several times to make sure the color was consistent across the backdrop. We found it was best to light the background separately from the sides, and the presenter from in front and slightly above, eliminating shadows on the backdrop. Also, standing a few feet in front of it helped considerably.

The software calibrates your backdrop automatically, but if you use something other than the provided green screen, you can calibrate it manually. Take your place and click the Live Preview button to see if it’s going to work. Once the background is calibrated, you can select an image to place behind you.

For testing purposes, we chose the default image—a temple in Bangkok. Ej4 also provides a couple dozen other locales from all around the world. Ideally, however you would want to use an image you’ve taken based upon your subject. Or, a PowerPoint presentation with your material, a slideshow of charts and numbers, your desktop as you go through your demonstration—even live video.

 

You have four choices for your finished project: 320x240 pixels for email, 400x300 pixels for web uses, 480x360 labeled CD, and 640x480, standard computer resolution, called HQ. While not quite full DVD resolution (720x480), this will burn nicely onto disc and will look great on most TVs and PCs.

The slider next to the video size gives you fastest and best for the compression settings. The application records in .wmv (Windows Media) format, and the slider will adjust the final size and quality. More compression means more artifacts, so unless you are streaming this to the internet or emailing it, you will want to opt for quality over speed. Somewhere in the middle is good to start with.

Choosing quality will also affect the load on your PC. The program requires Windows XP (SP2) or Vista and recommends a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 or faster, with 256 MB of RAM, DirectX 9.0c and a window-compatible sound card. You’ll also want a good quality USB-based webcam or a firewire (IEEE 1394) camcorder, some sort of microphone (wireless) and some lights.

For live video backgrounds, you’ll need to pre-setup Windows Media Player to play full-screen, with no menu bars. We added about 60 seconds of empty tape in front of our footage so we could watch the monitor and begin when the video did.

Here we decided that a second person helping was very beneficial. F8 and F9 are the hot keys once the program has started—F8 to begin the recording and F9 to stop.
Starting the video roll on the player in full screen, hit “Ready to Record”. Here a dialog box explains the F-keys and after clicking the OK, hit F8 to begin.

Now, we see the full-screen background video beginning and we can time our delivery by watching the monitor while we speak into the camera. Placing the camera just above the PC monitor makes this easier. When we’re finished, we hit F9 and the movie is saved to the destination folder we’ve specified.

All in all, fairly intuitive but a few minutes reading the PDF after installing and watching a couple of the online help videos before beginning will make things easier.

The controls for the program are simple and easy to navigate. Home gives you control over the bars and panels you want displayed as well as selectors for your audio and video sources.

Video and Audio gives you basic controls over Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation as well as options to choose Auto Color Key or Calibrate Color Key. “More Properties” lets you drill down into the audio and video selections for your hardware. Finally, volume control with an audio meter to check your sound and a mute button for turning off your microphone input.

The “Record” Tab gives you file destination options, the filename you would like, and the resolution you want to record at. The quality setting is last on the right.

Finally, the Hot Key Tab gives you choices for setting up the start and stop buttons (re-assigning them to other F-Keys), the Background Tab displays a gallery of the background images available. Help Tab gives you the PDF documentation and the link for online help at www.instantvideopresenter.com

The software sells for $259, but they’ll extend a July promotion and you can purchase the basic package for $129.99 for a while longer.

Once we had shot our presentation with IVP, we were then free to pull it into Windows Movie Maker to add titling and do some minor editing before burning it to DVD.