The View Panel presents three tabs that provide different views of your project:
The playback controls below the image can be used in any of the views. In left to right order, the play control buttons are:
During playback, you can click on the timeline ruler to change the playhead position at any time. Play will continue from that point.
Presto's playback frame update rate depends a lot on the source media and computer that Presto is running on, so playback may not be smooth. However, unlike Final Cut Pro which sometimes requires rendering before playback, pre-rendering of the project is not necessary for preview. To see smoother playback around a layout transition, place the playhead at the transition point, and press the "play around" button.
The lower left corner of the Output Preview shows the image size (in pixels) of the output that Final Cut Pro will render. The output size is determined by the size you set for the input sequence in Final Cut Pro.
The lower right corner shows the image size that is being displayed, and updates any time you adjust the window size.
The snapshot button in the lower center of the Output Preview provides a quick way to save a still image (PNG) of the current frame
(e.g. to use as a thumbnail for your final video). After you press the snapshot button, Presto will open a file save dialog for you to specify where to save the image.
By default the snapshots are automatically numbered as "Presto snapshot 1", "Presto snapshot 2", and so on.
The resolution of the image is the same as the sequence frame size (with square pixels).
Output Preview shows how your video will appear when rendered in FCP.
You can quickly review and resolve slide synchronization issues, and manually place slides, with the help of the Screen & Slides view. This view displays both the screen track and the slide track at the same time, with the slide as a smaller inset on the lower right of the view.
NOTE: The screen image will be blank if there is nothing on the
screen track at the current playhead position. Similarly, the slide image will be blank if there is nothing on the slide track at the current playhead position.
Screen & Slides view shows the Screen track and Slides track
together,
making it easy to check slide synchronization.
Advanced Option — Manual screen-slide alignment
Sometimes Presto will have difficulty aligning the screen with the slides, in preparation for matching the slides with the screen video. In this case you will get the following error message during processing:
Performing screen alignment failed
Use the manual
alignment option on the Screen & Slides tab, and run processing again
To use the manual alignment option, click on the Manual radio button in the Screen & Slides view.
Now you will see four yellow corner markers overlaid on the screen video.
Simply drag each marker so that it aligns with the appropriate corner of the slide, as illustrated below.
When you have finished positioning the corner markers, you can run processing again to automatically synchronize the slides with the screen video.
NOTE: You can move the playhead at any time to view a different part of the screen video. Make sure that you have a slide in view that has the corners clearly visible. For example, in the figure below, the lower left corner is difficult to see, whereas in the figure below the white background on the slide makes all four corners clearly visible. Be sure to place the corner markers on the corners of the slide, not the projection screen (which is often larger than the slide).
With the manual screen-slide alignment option on, drag the corner
markers
to align with the corners of the slide on the projection screen
The Presenter view shows the video on the presenter track, and makes it easy to edit the presenter tracking.
If you have more than one Presenter track, you can select the track you want to view from the Track pop-up menu in the lower left corner of the view. This menu is greyed out if there is only one Presenter track.
The radio buttons in the lower middle of the view select the view's mode:
NOTE: The presenter image will be blank if there is nothing on
the presenter track at the current playhead position.
Presenter view makes it easy to view the presenter video and to edit presenter tracking.
Editing Presenter Tracking
First make sure the Tracking radio button is selected.
The tracking box nearest to the current playhead is shown, as illustrated above.
If it is within 1 second of the current playhead position, the playhead will snap to the exact frame at which the tracking box is defined, and the box will be shown in green. When snapped to a tracking box, the playhead position will remain snapped to the location unless you move the playhead by a second or more.
To adjust the position of an existing tracking box, just drag it to the desired position.
To delete a tracking box, press the "–" button on the lower right of the view. Presto automatically interpolates between tracking boxes, irrespective of how far apart they are, so it is often not necessary to have a tracking box every second. Sometimes the quickest way to clean up any tracking errors is to simply delete them, as long as there are some good tracking points either side of the errors.
If the nearest tracking box is further than one second away from the current playhead position, it will instead be displayed in yellow, and it will not be editable.
To add a tracking box, press the "+" button on the lower right of the view. If a yellow tracking box is displayed, it will now turn green. You can adjust the position of the new tracking box by dragging it.
Presto applies its own filtering to the tracking results, so adjusting a tracking box may not always produce the expected result. Check the tracking boxes close in time to the one you are trying to adjust to ensure that these are reasonable.
Advanced Option — Manual Presenter Tracking
Sometimes it may save time to place a small number of tracking boxes manually, rather than processing the whole track. For example, if the presenter stays glued to the podium and hardly moves throughout the presentation, then you may be able to save time by manually placing a small number of tracking boxes using the Presenter view. However, be sure to scrub through the whole presentation to check that is applicable — you may be surprised to find how much the presenter moved after all!
To apply fully manual tracking, disable presenter tracking before you start processing. If you have already run the automatic tracking and want to remove the tracking boxes it generated, select the tracking task in the Process tab, right click on it, and choose Reset Selected Task(s).
After slide synchronization has completed, scrub through the presentation, manually placing tracking boxes at key points. You must have at least one tracking box defined in order for the two-up views to show the presenter close up.
Switch to the output preview to confirm that the tracking works well over every part of the presentation that uses a two-up layout.
NOTE: A good strategy to use if several presenters took turns at the podium is to place tracking boxes at the beginning and end of each presenters segment in the video. Recall that Presto interpolates between tracking boxes, so if you only place a single tracking box for each presenter you will see a gradual drift in the presenters position in the output as Presto interpolates from one tracking box to the next.