October 31, 2004
2 Caption Templates for MS Producer
If you purchase the MS Producer resource disk available here HERE you will find it contains an example of a Captioned Video template, along with this white paper captioning in Producer (MS Word format)
I found the one captioning template on the CD (captioned video with fixed-size slides) was a good beginning but quickly realized I needed several others. I made two more, which can be downloaded below. To use these templates, unzip them, and put the entire folders into the Producer templates directory on your C drive.
Within Producer, they will show up within the Templates area as:
"Standard Captioned Audio - Resizable Slides" Download Zip File (36K)
and "Standard Captioned Video (320x240) - Resizable Slides" Download Zip File (36K))
1.Edit and publish your Producer presentation as usual but using one or more of these captioning templates, then locate the folder that contains the published presentation. In that folder, you will find a file called "gogoprod.txt".
2.Add this line to the end of gogoprod.txt:
MediaPlayer.closedCaption.captioningID = "Misc8DIV";
This tells Windows Media Player where the captions should show up.
3.Then you need to write a SAMI file for each of the Windows Media Files that Producer created for your presentation. If you've never captioned before, I suggest reading "A Quick Start on captioning web video with Subtitle Workshop" to get going with free software.
4.Next step: telling Windows Media Player how to find the caption text file:
Once the SAMI files are created, put them on your web server, and note the location.
Open the folder that contains your published Producer presentation and locate 0Media.asx - in the subfolder titled "YourProjectName_files.
Open 0Media.asx in a text editor.
For each entry that you want captioned, you need to add
?http://location.of.your.sami.file/0MM0.smi
to the end of the URL for that entry.
So for example,
<ENTRY> <REF HREF = "mms://your.streaming.server.com/media/0mm0.wmv"/> </ENTRY>becomes
<ENTRY> <a href=mms://your.streaming.server.com/media/0mm0.wmv?http://location.of.your.sami.file/0MM0.smi/></ENTRY>
Test your presentation in the browser, and if the captions don't show up, double check the path to the SAMI file, and be sure that the new "gogoprod.txt" is in place.
October 26, 2004
Camtasia Studio Editor timeline previews don't show up right
In Camtasia Studio, previews of the project I was working on were showing up incorrectly or not at all. The problem would start after a few minutes of editing clips in the timeline. The preview area would either go black or show incorrect frames.
When the Camtasia screen capture Recorder is used, it will automatically ask if you would like hardware acceleration turned off, and will do that for you. However it turns out that the project Editor peformance is also improved when hardware acceleration is turned off, but that must be done manually.
To do so, right-click on the desktop, select "Properties" then the "settings" tab, then click the "Advanced" button, then select "Troubleshooting" tab, and move the hardware acceleration slider back to None.
The setting is buried in nested menus, but it works.
October 24, 2004
CSS Border-top does not show in empty cells
In IE, borders created by styling a table cell with "border-top" attribute do not show up when used on a td tag, unless there is some content inside the cell, at least a non-breaking space. This is not the case in other browsers - the border will show up even when the cell is blank.
In the example below, there is a single table, with three columns and three rows, but only the first 2 rows contain anything. The last row is completely empty. The tag "td" has been styled with
border-top-width: 2px;
border-top-style: solid;
border-top-color: #003399;
 |
 |
Internet Explorer (mac) | Safari |
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<style type="text/css">
<!--
td {
border-top-width: 2px;
border-top-style: solid;
border-top-color: #003399;
}
table {
background-color: #FFFF99;
}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table border="1" cellspacing="3">
<tr>
<td>xxx</td>
<td>uuu</td>
<td>yyy</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>xxx</td>
<td>xxx</td>
<td>xxx</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
October 20, 2004
Web video not showing up on screen when projected from a laptop
When using an LCD projector with a laptop to display a web page containing embedded video, the video shows up on the laptop, but not on the projected image on screen. According to "Projector People", the reason for this is:
" In most cases, Windows will lock out the ability to display motion video in two locations simultaneously because of the excessive resources needed. To bypass this, here are three options:
You can toggle off your laptop screen entirely so the projector is the primary display device. (usually FN + F8 or F10)
The other option would be to open a generic Windows media player prior to opening/starting your presentation. Windows will lock focus its lock on that one player, thus freeing up all remaining resources to display your true video/presentation.
Most video card manufacturers offer frequent driver updates. Search the manufacturers web site for updated drivers to your video card. Often there are new options included that can override the Windows lock.
See their Tips for Presenters page also
October 19, 2004
What Caused the Flu Vaccine Shortage?
I did a little research into why we now only have two (no, make that one!) suppliers of flu vaccine for the entire US, and why that supply is available only through the government. If the authors quoted below are correct, perhaps current policy needs to be revised.
I've heard various politicians and administrators lately (most recently Tommy Thompson) telling us how the flu vaccine shortage is not a public health problem, and people questioning how dangerous the flu can be. I have to disagree with them - for anyone who has asthma or respiratory diseases, or simply doesn't have a lot of defense against the flu, ithe possibility of getting a bad case of the flu can be a pretty scary prospect.
Almost a year ago, Robert Goldberg wrote about the federally-run, price-controlled bulk purchase of flu vaccine which covers all of us - whether we want it or not. According to Goldberg, director of thedirector of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Medical Progress.,
- "The current mismatch of immediate demand and available supply can be blamed on the federal Vaccines For Children Program...which buys up nearly 70 percent of all childhood vaccines at government-set prices, then distributes them to states according to a federally set formula... Vaccine prices have remained stagnant since 1994, while new regulations and lawsuits have driven up the cost of producing old vaccines and developing new ones.
Thanks to these policies, there are now only four developers of childhood vaccines -- down from 20. As a result, there have been periodic shortages of the 11 shots for vaccine-preventable childhood diseases for several years in a row...
December 17, 2003, in WorldNet Daily, Steve Marr wrote:
No Flu shot for You
"As folks scramble for the last bit of flu vaccine available, allegations abound on who is to blame. We need look no further then our federal government.
When Hillary Clinton was First Lady, she used her influence in health care to have government agencies buy most of the flu vaccine, rather then private parties. The action was taken to force the price of the shots as low as possible, by making government the big buyer. However, as a result, most companies could not make money producing the vaccine, leaving just two manufacturers in business. Also, last year manufacturers lost millions when doses went unsold....
...The combination of very low pricing and wide open legal liability has forced most manufacturers out of the marketplace, resulting in today's shortages. Economic history teaches that whenever the government establishes price controls, regardless of the controlling method, the result is a shortage...."
And from a review of a report put out by the Institute of Medicine, entitled "Hillary's Vaccine Shortage"
"...The national immunization system has achieved high levels of immunization, particularly for children, but faces new challenges, including: continued disparities in immunizations across geographic and socioeconomic populations; recent, unprecedented vaccine shortages; a diminishing number of vaccine suppliers; erosion and fragmentation of insurance coverage for immunization; and concerns about the level of private investment in both current vaccine production and future vaccine development.
Financing Vaccines in the 21st Century: Assuring Access and Availability (Aug. '03) addresses these challenges by proposing new strategies for assuring access to vaccines and sustaining the supply of current and future vaccines.
The report proposes a federal mandate, subsidy and voucher program for vaccines. The mandate would require all insurance plans to include vaccine benefits. The federal government would subsidize health plans and providers for the purchase costs and administration fees created by the vaccine mandate. Uninsured individuals would receive a voucher that could be used to receive immunization from any provider....
The report recommends changes to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the entity that currently recommends vaccines...."
Note, November 28, 2004: I recently found this article on the new Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the USA, which discusses how restrictive patent laws make it more difficult for vaccine makers to create new vaccines, particularly one that will protect us against a devastating bird-flu:
Patently Yours
by Sam Varghese
November 26, 2004
- "...The first line of defence is a vaccine. But the patent thicket that surrounds biotechnology has made it all but impossible for any single company to develop an effective vaccine using genetic engineering techniques. Only two companies in the world are attempting to develop such a vaccine - Aventis Pasteur, and Chiron. Both are attempting to do so in the US, and the patents problems are so intense that both companies are doing so under the protection of the US government - under National Institutes of Health contracts. To our knowledge, no other companies anywhere in the world are attempting to produce an avian flu vaccine - despite the obvious commercial rewards for succeeding - precisely because the biotechnology patents impede such activity, and no government other than the US has so far been prepared to offer protection for the companies concerned. This is an opportunity for innovation from which Australian companies are shut out because of the patent thicket surrounding this vaccine..."
Reference links:
- National Immunization Program, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices website
- NIP:ACIP (Advisory Committe on Immunization Practices) Meeting Dates
- Agenda of the upcoming NIP:ACIP meeting on Oct. 27-28
- Complete text of report: Financing Vaccines in the 21st Century: Assuring Access and Availability (Aug. '03)
- Institute of Medicine website
- CDC: Current Issues in Immunization NetConference, powerpoints and recast of conference focusing on "Influenza Immunization and Influenza Vaccine Supply."
- No Flu Vaccine Shortage At Capitol: Hill's Doctor Urges Members to Get Shots
- World Health Organization: Communicable Disease Surveillance & Response: Influenza
October 16, 2004
Importing bookmarks into Safari
After a recent disk crash I had to reinstall the OS, including Safari. Naturally I wanted to import my old bookmarks into Safari, but for some reason, they left the import feature out of the default settings.
To get it turned on, you need to enable the "debug" menu in Safari. It can be turned on either by using "Tinkertool" (find it at versiontracker.com), or by typing the following command in Terminal (while Safari is NOT running):
% defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
October 15, 2004
KDX client gets disconnected after reinstalling OS
After reinstalling OS X, I was having trouble with a KDX client being disconnected every 15 minutes or so, despite the fact that "regularly ping servers" was on. It turned out that in reinstalling, the energy saver settings had been set back to the factory defaults, and the CPU and hard disk were both sleeping after 15 minutes of non-activity. Setting the sleep settings for those two items to "never" fixed the problem.
October 14, 2004
Windows Media Player not responding to Player.controls.stop command
I have been working on a fancy player interface that can be integrated into web pages, which features several tabs - each of which stops one player and starts another. I had a script called "shutOffAllPlayers" which stops all players at once, and is called when you click on any tab:
function shutOffAllPlayers ()
{
Player1.controls.stop();
Player2.controls.stop();
Player3.controls.stop();
}
Then in the onClick statement for each tab, I put
Javascript:shutOffAllPlayers ()
This was working well until today, when I upgraded Windows 2000 with a variety of security patches. Now for some reason it no longer works. Once a player starts, it keeps on going, even when another tab is clicked. I tried using
document.Player1.controls.stop
and
Player1.stop
(which worked in earlier versions of Windows Media Player) but neither worked.
However I found that putting the specific stop command right in the onClick statement itself does work. So it now looks like:
"Javascript:Player1.controls.stop; etc..."
which stops the player just as it should.
Subtitle Workshop: Error on "Join Subtitles" command
In Subtitle Workshop, trying to use the Join tool to join two SAMI files and recalculate the timings would result in this error every time:
The following error (EConvertError) was derived from object TfrmJoin (frmJoin): "" is not a valid floating point value"The solution is: open each of the original SAMI files in turn and make sure to give them each a value for "input FPS" and "FPS". Resave each. Then run the Join tool. No more error.
October 13, 2004
Can't install OS X on a newly partitioned firewire drive
Since upgrading to 10.3.5 and Final Cut Pro 4.5 HD I have been having no end of problems with Final Cut crashing on launch (solved that one here) and with "log and capture" freezing toward the end of a tape.
I decided to revert to using OS X 10.3.4, and attempted to install it on a new 200 GB Firewire drive I had laying around.
I started up using the Panther install disk, then opened Disk Utility, and partitioned the drive. Then I opened the installer and attempted to install OS X onto it. However the three partition icons for that drive all had the little red "stop" sign over them, and selecting any of those icons got me this message:
"You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot startup your computer using this volume."
Quitting the installer and then restarting it made it recognize the partitions as bootable, and the problem was solved.
I found that the only way to install the Intel-Mac version of Tiger on a firewire drive is to reformat the drive with the GUID option set. Boot from the Intel-Tiger install CD and launch Disk Utility. Select the Firewire drive and "Partition". Click the Options button and select "GUID" then partition the drive however you wish.
See this article on "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume..." alert in Installer
October 7, 2004
Producer presentations start in the middle instead of the beginning
Producer has a bookmarking feature that makes it start up wherever you last left off. Unfortunately, this behavior simply confuses many of our users, who barely notice the Table of Contents.
It turns out you can force the presentation to start at the beginning by adding
#event=1to the link to the presentation.
Thanks to Roger Swearingeh on the microsoft.public.producer newsgroup for this.
October 2, 2004
Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 quits on launch under OSX 10.3.5
The other day, almost without thinking, I hit the "install" button on software update, and upgraded to 10.3.5. Since then, I can NOT run Final Cut Pro 4.5. It always unexpectedly quits on launch.I had to switch system disks to get it to run.
See this thread for others having the same issue.
FCP HD Crashes on launch
Note: 2 days later, problem solved, thanks to this technote from Apple
1. Open Terminal
2. Type
sudo update_prebinding -root / -force
3. Press Return.
4. Enter your password when prompted.
Restart your computer.