Presentation with Freezeframes

What is the best way to do this?:

Client wants to do a live presentation with video support. The idea is, the video plays a segment, then stops at a predetermined point. The image then freezes at that point or perhaps loops. The speaker does his thing, takes a question or two, then hits play (spacebar) to continue. This happens 8 times over the course of the presentation.

The presentation is in a large meeting room with HD projection. The presenter will have a laptop (mac or pc, they want me to tell them what's best) to play the video file off and feed signal via HDMI to the projector. Easy enough, with time planned to rehearse and test.

What I'm still pondering is what best to provide them with. DVD with Chapters? Kind of clunky with sluggish response and only SD.

Been there done that? What works better?



Clay

One way to do it, which may be utterly impractical in your case, is to play the presentation from an FCP timeline. Make your freeze frame long enough (10 seconds?) to give the presenter time to react to it and press space to pause it. Then to continue, press down-arrow to move the playhead to the next cut (back to motion pictures) and press space to start playing it right away.

Not exactly a "package" to deliver to a client, but under your circumstances it might suffice.

Scott

why not powerpoint? If not PP, you need to use some sort of presentation software that can handle this type of thing.

There is also theatrical cue software that can deal with video and playlists and some is quite scriptable. I don't have the names handy but they're out there. I remember one that had a great rental plan where you could rent the functions that you needed per production. The full package was expensive but you didn't need to have it all. Sorry for the vagueness but I am away from my system.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

We do this all the time in an educational setting.

We utilize DVDSP, have the video play to where they want the pause, then have the DVD go to a menu or in our case a still frame, when they hit next or enter its to the next a video track, and so on.

I have tried a few different ways but this seemed to work best for OUR uses.

Our projects tend to get pretty complex as we also have a simulated Q & A with our educators and the video. But that is up to the educator to get the timing right.

Looks we're going the DVD route, at least for the first time out.

Thanks for all the thoughts / input.

A few other points. If you are presenting from a Mac, you do not necessarily have to burn to disc, which is less responsive. You can burn it as a disc image, and open it with DVDSP. Also, you can try the HD DVD feature in DVDSP, which has higher frame resolution than DVD.



www.strypesinpost.com

That's a really smart idea DCA_film - making the end jump a menu or a still. I'll be storing that one.