ClipBoard-2000 is a Quicktime based system which records its media in Quicktime and produces Quicktime based lectures for web-delivery. RealProducer is capable of encoding from Quicktime into Real, so it is possible that these lectures can be imported into Sync-O-Matic for publishing.
Sync-O-Matic and ClipBoard use the same format for image files and recording the timings of when each image file is to be shown within a lecture so the only problem is to convert the Quicktime file (rawmedia.mov) into a Real file (rawmedia.rm).
This conversion facility is built-into Sync-O-Matic, but unfortunately the Windows RealProducer cannot read very many different Quicktime formats. Fortunately, the RealProducer on the Macintosh can handle the files just fine. This is interesting because the Quicktime player on Windows is quite capable of playing the Quicktime files under Windows.
Before you start, it is important to make sure that you have the latest version of Quicktime and RealProducer installed both on the PC and Macintosh systems you will be using.
Starting on the Macintosh, we have the four image files exported from Office-98 PowerPoint on the Macintosh.
When we start ClipBoard, first we select the appropriate directory.
Press the Record button and off we go using ClipBoard-2000 to record the lecture.
This shows the contents of the directory after the lecture has been recorded. The files of interest are the image files, the images.txt, and the rawmedia.mov files.
The other files describe the scribbling, typing, and pointing that ClipBoard-2000 supports through Quicktime they are not used by Sync-O-Matic (at least so far).
We use some file transfer to move the files to the PC. This can be FTP or some shared directory.
On the PC, start Sync-O-Matic go to Options | More Detail and Open a lecture.
Navigate to the directory which has been transferred from the Macintosh.
All of the image and event files (images.txt) are already compatible with Sync-O-Matic, so the only remaining task is to convert the Quicktime media to Real Media. ClipBoard names its media rawmedia.mov and Sync-O-Matic names its media rawmedia.rm.
To convert media, execute Execute | Import ClipBoard.
Sync-O-Matic detects the presence of the rawmedia.mov file without a rawmedia.rm file so it decides to let us encode the file using RealEncoder. Press Start to begin the encoding process. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen indicates how much work remains to be done.
Sadly, this is where the Windows RealProducer often fails to be able to encode many of the Quicktime media types. Sometimes RealProducer even hangs completely at this point.
If you experience strange problems, first try to encode manually using the RealProducer from the rawmedia.mov to the rawmedia.rm. Usually if the Sync-O-Matic encode fails the manual encode will fail in the same way.
The typical solution is to use RealProducer on the Macintosh which is capable of handling all types of Macintosh Quicktime files. We will see an example of this in a moment.
Sometimes, instead of hanging, the RealProducer may complain with a message similar to this. Again, the solution typically is to switch to the Macintosh RealProducer.
If the encode is successful (no error messages), the next step is to publish the lecture normally. But for now, we assume the worst case and jump back to the Macintosh
to use RealProducer.
Now we start RealProducer on the Macintosh. First you use File | Open File to
select the Quicktime file.
Choose the rawmedia.mov file from the ClipBoard directory.
Encoding will take a while as the progress bar moves to indicate the amount of remaining work.
Save the resulting file as rawmedia.rm. Conveniently, this is the default name.
Once the whole directory is transferred to the PC,
there are rawmedia.mov and rawmedia.rm files.
Start Sync-O-Matic and after you have opened the proper lecture, you will notice that the publish button is enabled because the rawmedia.rm file exists - go ahead and publish the lecture normally.
The lecture can be published from either the Less Detail or More Detail screens in Sync-O-Matic.
The rest of the publishing process occurs normally.
Press the Test button to see the Sync-O-Matic (Real) version of the same lecture recorded using ClipBoard-2000.
The wrinkle in the process is the fact that the Conversion from Quicktime to Real may have to be done on the Macintosh before the files are transferred to the Windows system. While this documentation showed the attempt to use RealProducer on the PC before converting the files on the Mac, your typical process will simply convert the files on the Macintosh.
With this feature, you can produce both a Quicktime and Sync-O-Matic version of a lecture, giving your viewers maximum flexibility. Some day, with a single recording, you will be able to give your viewers a web-lecture in nearly any format they are capable of handling. For that to happen, each of the different publishing tools must accept a standard "lecture object" and automatically publish this object using server based techniques.
Ah, but that is the future. For now, we do the best we can.