Adobe OVATION User Manual

User Guide

This manual may not, in whole or in any part, be copied, photocopied, reproduced, translated or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable format without prior written consent from Serious Magic, Inc.

Content included as part of the Ovation software, including without limitation, all music, sound effects, images, animations, video effects, 3D objects or font ﬁles (“Content”) is licensed to You for Your personal use only and is subject to all the terms and conditions set forth in the Limited Warranty and License Agreement accompanying the Ovation software (“License Agreement”). Please refer to the License Agreement for the terms and conditions.

Swiss™, Bitstream® Mister Earl™.

Table of Contents

Foreword 1

Introduction

Getting Started 7

Installing ................................................................................................... 7

Quick Start ................................................................................................ 8

Loading a PowerPoint® Show in Ovation ........................................................ 8

Selecting a PowerLook™ ................................................................................ 8

Delivering a Show ........................................................................................... 9

Feature Overview 11

PowerLooks™ .......................................................................................... 11

Deeper ....................................................................................................12

The TimeKeeper™ ................................................................................... 12

PointPrompte

r™ ....................................................................................... 13

Special Purpose Slides ...........................................................................14

Adding Your Own Graphics to the Look ...................................................

The Fundamentals 17

Launching Ovation and Loading a Presentation .......................................18

Selecting a PowerLook for Your Presentation ........................................... 19

Setting the Default Look ................................................................................ 20

Adding a Look to Favorites ........................................................................... 20

Getting More PowerLooks ............................................................................

Other Setup Steps ........................................................................................ 20

Presenting .....................................................................................................

Starting the Presentation ...............................................................................

Auto-Advancing Based on Slide Times—The Kiosk Mode ............................ 22

Navigating ..................................................................................................... 23

Playing Video and Audio Clips .................................................................24

Go to Black or White ...............................................................................24

Stopping a Presentation ..........................................................................

Saving ..................................................................................................... 24

Exporting for Sharing ............................................................................... 25

More Help Online 27

Orientation to Ovation’s Interface .............................................................

Designing in PowerPoint for the Best Results in Ovation ..........................27

Advanced Features and Options ..............................................................

Setting Up ..................................................................................................... 27

Presenting .....................................................................................................

Appendix: Dual Display Setup 29

Connecting the Second Display ............................................................... 29

Display Settings ....................................................................................... 30

Setting the Full Screen Output and Ovations Interface

to Appear on Monitor 1 or Monitor 2 ..................................................31

Index 32

Keyboard Shortcuts 36

Foreword

A Brief History of Presentations

Step back in time more than 40,000 years to the banks of a stream in what is now

southeastern France. The leader of a tribe of cave dwellers is addressing the chiefs of four

neighboring tribes that have been battling each other for generations. Language has not yet

fully formed, and he struggles to communicate the revolutionary idea in his mind. It is an

idea that could change the entire world as they know it.

Of the scarce few words at his command, there are none for intangibles like peace,

coexistence, or shared destiny. In frustration, he draws an arrow from his quiver, kneels,

and deliberately traces a series of lines in the sand. The other men watch intently, confusion

giving way to cautious nods as the shapes emerge into a map of the surrounding terrain.

Then the tip of the spear divides the map with new boundaries. The size of each new region

is nearly equal. The natural resources are split almost evenly between them. In silence,

each man ponders the shocking idea of voluntarily reshaping his tribe’s ancestral territory.

Within a few minutes there is agreement. The men look probingly into one another’s eyes,

and conclude their treaty by slowly nodding in unison. This is not only one of the ﬁ rst such

peace councils in the history of humankind but also among the earliest presentations.

Fast forward to April 17, 1492, some 500 miles to the southwest. Christopher Columbus

stands before Isabella, Queen of Castile, holding a map showing the continents of Europe

and Africa on the right and Asia on the left, with little but ocean between them. When the

dashing Genoese navigator ﬁ nishes, Isabella asks several pointed questions, but the huge

potential return on investment is tantalizing. She wastes little time in agreeing to sponsor

the mission. Here we witness the green-lighting of arguably the single most momentous

expedition ever undertaken. As it happens, this also marks a very early use of a visual aid

produced on a printing press, which had been invented only four decades earlier.

Our next step ahead in time covers just 400 years. Thomas Edison is making a pitch to a

small group of investors in Manhattan whom he hopes will help fund the construction of

a factory to mass-produce light bulbs. They assume that the prototype bulb that glows

above Edison’s head is his one and only exhibit, so they are surprised when the inventor

turns it off and his assistant switches on another light inside a box at the back of the room.

Projected on the wall in front of them is a ghostly image taken along the Mohawk River near

Schenectady, New York. The deal that the men draft later that afternoon both secures the

future of Edison’s great breakthrough and launches a new corporation, General Electric. His

presentation, too, is noteworthy for the use of a projected photographic image in a meeting

of global consequence.

The technology of projecting images continues to advance rapidly from the Magic Lantern

used by Edison. By the 1950s, a quiet yet determined researcher named Jonas Salk is

using a primitive mechanical slide projector in his campaign for universal immunization to

eradicate polio. The combination of heart-wrenching images of children in steel leg braces

and charts illustrating clear results helps him overcome widespread fear of a vaccine made

from the very virus that causes the disease. Just a decade later, professors of electrical

engineering rely on mass-produced Bell & Howell overhead projectors to teach the

fundamentals of integrated circuits to a generation of promising young engineers. These

students will go on to develop the chips at the heart of the computer that you use to give

PowerPoint presentations, and on which you will soon be using Ovation.

While elements of these vignettes may be more apocryphal than literal, the point remains

that every undertaking worthy of note begins as merely an idea — an idea that can only

grow into action when it is effectively communicated to others. Whether the goal is to

inform, motivate, inspire, or simply share a vision of the future, effectively delivering your

message is crucial to your success.

The Future of Presentations

How does the software you now hold in your hands ﬁ gure into the future of presentations?

At Serious Magic, we believe that the evolution of presentations will entail signiﬁ cantly

enhanced visuals as well as new tools that help improve a presenter’s delivery, so we

developed Ovation to offer major new capabilities in these two fundamental areas. It

dramatically improves the appearance of your presentation, letting you choose the degree

of visual enhancement, from subtly polished to vibrantly dynamic. It also provides tools that

help you deliver that presentation more effectively. If you take full advantage of Ovation’s

presenter tools, they will help ensure that you conﬁ dently hit all the points you wanted to

cover. They will allow you to drill deeper on issues that interest your audience. And they will

help improve your pacing, so that you don’t end up having to rush through key material at

the end of the presentation. Combined, Ovation’s features can help you enhance the overall

impact of your presentations and, in so doing, achieve your objectives.

To us, Ovation is more than just a commercial product. It is also a singular technical

achievement, a unique work of art and, ultimately, a labor of love. It began years ago when

a talented team was assembled from a range of disciplines to build a new kind of tool.

Software architects and engineers crafted a highly optimized graphics engine capable of

rendering imagery from the sublime to the spectacular. Artists and designers started with a

blank page and envisioned how the visuals for future presentations might look. Then they

painstakingly breathed life into those visions by modeling, texturing, and animating pixels

and polygons until they became art in motion.

In the end, all that really matters is what Ovation does for you. Our hope is that it makes

you more successful by helping you deliver your messages more effectively. After all,

more than 30 million presentations are delivered every business day. Now some of those

will be Ovation powered. It’s an exciting thought. Every time Ovation helps you delight

someone with a touch of grace and elegance on the screen, each time an audience senses

the extra poise and conﬁ dence in your delivery, we’ll be cheering you on. If Ovation helps

your presentation stand above the rest, if tomorrow’s audiences are more captivated than

yesterday’s, then together we will have succeeded.

— The Serious Magic Team

Introduction

The basic idea behind Ovation is simple. It is a player for PowerPoint shows that

“re-imagines” your slides on-the-ﬂ y into a more polished and professional presentation.

The result is to give you the beneﬁ ts of hiring a team of expert graphic designers and

animators to create a custom presentation for you—without spending thousands of

dollars and enduring weeks of delay. While the ﬁ nished output can range from subtly

sophisticated to dynamically dazzling, the process remains easy because you still create

your presentations in PowerPoint.

Ovation also introduces several highly effective tools to help you be a better presenter.

By using your computer’s dual screen output capability, the program displays the full-

screen output to your audience while you’re running the show through Ovation’s interface.

Its presentation tools help you stay on time and on point. To aid in keeping on schedule,

Ovation has not only a timer that can count up or down but also a TimeKeeper, which

shows at a glance whether you’re running too slow, too fast, or just right. To ensure that

you cover all your material, the PointPrompter displays your notes for each slide in large,

easy-to-read text.

Getting Started

Installing

Insert the Ovation Installation disc into your PC’s CD drive and wait for the installer to

launch. If the installer does not launch automatically, use Windows Explorer to view the

contents of the CD and double-click the Setup.exe ﬁ le. Follow the instructions in the wizard.

Before installing Ovation, make sure that your computer meets the following

requirements:

• Operating System: Windows® XP or 2000

• Processor:

Minimum: Intel® Pentium® 4 / Celeron class 1.6GHz,

Pentium® M / Celeron M 1.2GHz, or AMD® Athlon™ 1600

Recommended:

- Pentium® 4 / Celeron 2.4GHz

- Pentium® M / Celeron M 1.7GHz

- AMD® Athlon™ 2400

• RAM: 256 MB (512 MB recommended)

• Graphics Processor:

Minimum: Any nVIDIA® GeForce™, ATI® Radeon®, or Intel® Extreme or better graphics

processor with 32 MB of graphics memory

Recommended:

- ATI® Radeon® 9800 class or better

- nVIDIA® GeForce® 6600 class or better

- 64 MB of graphics memory

• CD-ROM drive

• 450 MB available hard drive space

• Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2002 (XP), 2003, or newer

(PowerPoint is also part of Microsoft Ofﬁ ce™)

If Microsoft PowerPoint® 2002 or newer is not installed, you will not be able to import

presentations into Ovation. The installation wizard will alert you if PowerPoint is not present,

but you can proceed with installation regardless.

Quick Start

The shortest path to getting a show running in Ovation takes just three steps:

1. Load a PowerPoint presentation into Ovation.

2. Choose a look for the show.

3. Deliver the presentation.

Of course, Ovation has a host of features and options for improving both the look of your

presentations and your delivery of them, but everything beyond these three basic steps is

entirely optional.

The section titled The Fundamentals provides complete instructions for these three steps,

but we’ve boiled them down to the essentials here.

Loading a PowerPoint® Show in Ovation

Drag and drop a PowerPoint ﬁ le (.ppt) onto the Ovation icon on your desktop. If you

don’t have a slide show handy, use the Ovation Example show that was installed on your

desktop. To learn three other ways to load a show, see

Launching and Loading on

page 18.

Selecting a PowerLook™

On the Choose Look panel, select a category in the pane on the left, then click a

PowerLook in the pane on the right. (If the selected category shows a set of folders instead

of PowerLooks, double-click one of the folders to open it.) You can immediately preview the

look in the preview monitor on the far right.

Loading a Look may take a moment:

If your computer has an older graphics card, then

Ovation will optimize the PowerLook to deliver smoother performance on your machine

when you are presenting. Depending on the speed of your computer, this optimization

might take up to several minutes.

Something Amiss? Tweak the Treatment:

Ovation’s marvelous graphical feats can

change the layout and all aspects of the font treatment for your slides. In performing

this makeover, Ovation will determine how far it can go in overhauling each slide. If you

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