Articles Slide Show:
1) Library
of Congress 85
2) S.F. Examiner MacQuality 85
3) MACazine 85
5) MacGuide 87
by JoAnn Stewart
I was delighted to see the empty Macintosh packing boxes in front of my boss' office that Monday morning a few weeks ago. Although the first microcomputer that had made its way into The Library of Congress was an Apple computer several years ago some of those micros of the "big
blue" brand have
recently been showing up. So, upon seeing a Macintosh I cheerfully greeted
my boss that morning, congratulating him on his good taste in microcomputers.
I discussed briefly with him the many capabilities of the Mac, with my enthusiasm
showing for the one that I had at home, and then I went back to my work. Several
days later, much to my surprise, I was assigned to bring up the application
on the Mac for which it was purchased - a slide show, to be shown by the Mac,
depicting a brief history of typography as part of a new Library exhibit called
"Books and Other Machines”. This appeared to be a most
interesting project until I found out that the deadline was just a brief 10
days to the start of the exhibit. The project became doubly challenging, because
this was the first time an exhibit of this type had been computer-generated
at the Library.
The scenario for the slide show includes text describing the history of typography
and illustrations of various kinds of type fonts, from old books in their
original language of publication to examples of modern commercial uses of
type. Luckily for me, at a recent Apple Pi SigMac meeting, the new Magic program
had been demonstrated. We decided this versatile program suited our immediate
needs and obtained it, together with a camera. This program photographs and
digitizes an image through a video camera onto the Mac screen. In order to
gain a more precise black/white image our video camera was fitted with a Nikon
macro lens. By using the Magic control screen, set up much like MacPaint,
surrounding the digitized image on the Mac screen, the exact focus and light
exposure of the image are refined. This image is saved as a MacPaint document
from which further editing is easily done. The Magic program disk contains
MacPaint and can be selected directly from the control screen without having
to return to the Magic disk's index.
Even the size of the image can be manipulated. This is part particularly helpful
because the best focus of the image by the camera does not always produce
the picture needed to make a slide. The size for the slide was dictated by
a new program, just on the market, called Slide Show Magician. This program
uses MacPaint documents to generate a slide presentation. It requires the
slide image to fit into an area just slightly larger than a Mac screen image.
It provides a mask overlay from which to test the size of the slide image.
It then works interactively with the user to build a script for each slide
in the show. Items, such as the length of time the slide is to be shown, the
type of special effects to begin the slide with, any text which is to be superimposed
over the slide and how this is to be revealed, are selected from menus. At
any point during the creation of the show, the current slide or the whole
show can be reviewed. The program also has easy-to-use updating capabilit1es
to add, delete or insert slides into the show. And the best part of all is
that it takes but a few minutes to develop a presentation.
As was expected, the photography part of the project was the most time-consuming.
In order to get the initial image of the object on the Mac screen, the camera
on a tripod was repositioned and adjusted for focus. Then the Magic program
black/white controller on the control screen was used to correct the contrast
of the displayed Image. Next, the “full focus mode" capabilities
was used to display the full image without the encumbering control panel border.
The image in this mode is continuously displayed at 1.4 frames/ second. When
the image is the best one observed, the automatic focusing is stopped and
the image is saved as a MacPaint document.
We found the procedure that seemed to achieve the fastest results for us was to do several hours of photography work per day, edit these documents, and then update the slide show with them. So when the photography session was ended for the day, Macpaint was used to call up each document and
Next, the Slide Show Magician program was loaded and scripts for the slide show were developed. The edit screen in the build-show program includes a display of a tiny image of the MacPaint document being included in the script. Four additional screens are cycled through to develop the complete script for the current slide; these take less than a minute to complete. At any point, the show as developed can be reviewed, so that timing for slides and other special effects can be tested in the context of the whole show. It is easy to make a change; the same five edit screens are cycled through to update any aspect of the script. The show can then be re-reviewed, if desired.
The limitations for us in the Slide Show Magician program were two fold. One, each slide show could contain only 50 slides due to a program-Imposed limit on an index table. Because shows can be easily chained from one show to the next without any time delay in the changeover, this proved only a temporary problem. Since ours was to be a continuous slide show, we chained the end of one slide show to the start of the next show. The second limitation was that the program which builds the show is copy protected so it could not be put on the hard disk, where we had hoped to store the whole show as one. The presentation program, which displays the slides from the scripts, is not copy protected but does not have hard disk capabilities. However, it does work easily with two disk drives and the time between each slide from one to five seconds was enough for the slide to be accessed and displayed correctly. So this, too, was only a temporary problem. However, it is hoped that the software firm is making adaptations for hard disk capabilities.
When the slide show presentation was completed, 85 slides had been developed, which takes about 12 minutes to view. The MacPaint documents, which comprise the slides, take most of the space on two disks together with the scripts and the presentation program. Since the show is continuously presented over a 10-hour period each day, we bunt in a series of 5 countdown slides following the trailer slide, showing from "50 seconds to the next show" down to 10 seconds, for viewer continuity and interest.
We held a preview for members of Library management in charge of the new exhibit. They were impressed with the capabilities demonstrated by the Mac, particularly how fast and easy it was to bring up such a presentation. Naturally, they had some suggestions to improve some scripts and wanted several pictures added. With just a few hours remaining until the official opening of the exhibit, my boss and I photographed, refined, saved, edited, and scripted the changes to the slide show. It felt like we were doing it in double-time, but we delivered the finished product on schedule. We could not have done it without the amazing Macintosh.
Since this exhibit needed the Macintosh itself to show the presentation suddenly it felt lonely for me to be without the Mac, especially when the printer and hard disk drive were left behind. My boss must have felt the same way, because a new Macintosh showed up shortly thereafter. Imagine, a Mac at home and another at the office... it' s a dream come true.
To contact us send eMail. ScottMcTyre@MCFIII.COM
