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| How to make transparent backgrounds in WildPresenter |
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tutorial applies to the Flash SWF output from
WildPresenter Pro 2+ and WildPresenter Lite 2+. |
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| Introduction |
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Creating transparent backgrounds in WildPresenter is easy. Not only can you create a transparent background for your entire project, you can also control the level of transparency of individual SWFs, and images within your project. You can also apply transparent backgrounds to videos within WildPresenter. |
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| Adding a transparent background to your project |
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To add a transparent background to your entire project, go to the New Project Wizard (located under the Wizard menu) and click through the new project wizard screens until you reach this screen: |
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Check the "Make background transparent" box. Checking this checkbox will cause the background to be transparent. If you select this, the background will appear white in WildPresenter, (since the color selected above is white) but when your project is exported, the background will actually be transparent and will not have any color.
If you would prefer to have WildPresenter default to always exporting transparent slides, you may change this default preferences in the Options Window. To change the default setting so that WildPresenter always exports slides with transparent backgrounds, from the View menu open the Option Window and check the "Slide background transparency" box. (You can always change your default setting back.) |
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| Adding a transparent background to individual slides |
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| If you have multiple slides in your project you may want to add transparent backgrounds to some of your slides, and not others. To add a transparent background to an individual slide, select a slide (by clicking on it) and open the Slide Settings Window located under the View menu. Check the "Transparent Background" box. Your slide background will disappear from the slide. |
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| Adding transparency to your files in WildPresenter |
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| You can also control the alpha (transparency) level any image or Flash SWF in WildPresenter, including the animated text effects you can create in the program. To change the transparency level, select the file you wish to modify by clicking on it in the preview pane. Then open the Object Settings Window (under the View menu) and click on the Appearance tab. |
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| At the bottom of the Object Settings Window, slide the Alpha setting to the level of transparency you desire. 0 is fully transparent and 100 is fully opaque. |
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| The transparency level of your selected file will not be visible in the edit mode of your WildPresenter stage. In order to view the transparency level, click Play Preview or export your file and play it. Our file now looks like this: |
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| Creating a video file with a transparent background |
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You can also create video with a transparent background. There are two ways to do this, whic are described below.
NOTE: the following section can also be viewed as an online training tutorial.
Working with a video that has alpha channel
An alpha channel is an extra channel within a video that is supported in some but not all video codecs that allows you to specify a transparent background. If you are working with a video that already has an alpha channel in it, in the File menu select "Import File" and open the Video/Audio/Image importer. Select a video that has a transparent background in it. Select an encoding preset from the dropdown menu. To use alpha channel you need to encode using either the Flash 8 SWF or Flash 8 FLV formats. |
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| Next, go to the Video/Audio tab. |
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| Note that if your input frame rate is 15, set the framerates in Framerate options to match that. You want your video and swf framerates to be a factor of the source video framerate. If your video has an alpha channel in it, click the Alpha Channel box. Click the encode button and encode your video. When you are finished encoding, close the video importer. The video is now on your stage. |
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| When we play the video you can see the background of the top video is not visible. |
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Working with a video that does not have an alpha channel
If you are working with a video that does not have an alpha channel, you may add an alpha channel to it in WildPresenter. To do this, you need a video with a solid background. We will open the Video/Audio/Image importer again and select a video with a solid background. Our video has a black background. |
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| Next, select a preset. Again we need to select either a Flash 8 SWF or Flash 8 FLV preset. After selecting a preset, go into the Video/Audio tab. |
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Note that the input framerate is 30. We will now change our Video and SWF framerates to 15, since 15 is a factor of 30. (15 divides evenly into 30.) In this case, because the video does not have an alpha channel in it, we are NOT going to check the Alpha Channel box.
Next, we need to open the Edit/Crop images window. |
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| Check the Transparency box. You now have the ability to take out a specified color. We are going to take out the color black, since it is our background color. |
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| The tolerance option changes it from being more transparent to less transparent. Close this window and click encode. When the video is finished, we can view the video. When we play it on our stage it looks like this: |
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| One further point. Both of our videos were encoded at 15 frames per second. You want to make sure your project framerate is also set for 15 frames per second. To do this, go into the Project Settings Window (located in the View menu) and click the Output tab. Set your framerate in this tab to 15 frames per second, to ensure that the video in your project will play smoothly. |
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| Conclusion |
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| There are many ways to making transparent backgrounds in WildPresenter and they are all easy. To view the video of the still images included in this tutorial, please view our online training tutorial on Video with Alpha Channel. |
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