Making a Presentation from a template

1. In the menu bar, click the Presentations link and then click Add From Template.
2. A list of all the Template Presentations in your Company and being shared by your Network Operator will appear. Click Select next to the desired template, or if you want to preview the template before copying it into your Company, press Preview next to the template Presentation name.
3. Once it has been created, click on the Settings icon (as illustrated in the image below). From here you can rename it, change the resolution, make it a template, as well as hide or unhide the mouse pointer.
4. If you are planning to make this a shared Template Presentation for your client Companies, do all your desired changes and updates to the Presentation before making it a template. Once you are ready to do so, go back into the settings and check the Template checkbox to make it a template, and then press Okay. Save the Presentation, and it is now available to all your client Companies as a Template Presentation.

Once you have your Presentation open in the Presentation Editor, there are a few options available:

• Presentation Status: If you are going to be doing lots of edits to a Presentation, you don’t all of them showing on your live Displays, so every time you press Save your Presentation Status is changed to “Revised“. While your Presentation is in a revised state, the Displays won’t update with these changes, but your Preview does. This way you can get it to look exactly how you want before rolling it out to the live Displays. If you make a change you don’t want, from the Presentation status dropdown, hit “Restore” and it goes back to the last published version of the Presentation. Once you are ready for the Presentation to go out to the Displays, press “Publish” in the Presentation Status dropdown. You’ll also notice that when you look at your list of Presentations, the state of each Presentation is listed.
• Add Placeholder: Placeholders can be sized and positioned however you need, and can be layered on top of each other to create the exact look that you’re after. Placeholders contain the Gadgets and items that you want to show in your Presentation.
• Copy/Paste: Once you have finished adding content to your Placeholder, you can choose to Copy the Placeholder, and Paste it into this same Presentation, or a different Presentation. This copies everything in the Placeholder, including Distribution, Timelines and settings.  You can also use the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V buttons on your keyboard to copy and paste Placeholders.
• Preview: Previewing your Presentation will allow you to get a good look at exactly what it looks like on a Display. Remember, “Revised” Presentations show their changes in preview, but not on the Display. To roll out to the Display, hit “Publish”. Previews show a transparent loading animation until all of your content is loaded and then shows your Presentation front and center. One thing to keep in mind when previewing a Presentation  is that any timeline or distribution settings are ignored, so if you scheduled something to play a few weeks from now , it will still show up in your Preview regardless of the date.
• Save: Saves your Presentation with whatever changes you have made to it. If your Presentation is in a state of “Published”, saving it changes it to “Revised”.
• Copy Presentation: Creates an exact duplicate of your Presentation, with a new name of “Copy Of” and your original Presentation name.
• Delete: Deletes your Presentation. If you try to delete a Presentation that is currently being used in a Schedule, a red error message pops up stating you can’t delete this Presentation until it is removed from any Schedules it is currently assigned to.
• Cancel: Cancels any changes you have made since you last saved.
• Settings: From here you can rename your Presentation, change the resolution, edit the background color or image, make it a template, or hide the mouse pointer.
• Help: You’ll see this icon for any Presentations that have an associated help file. You can integrate your own help file for your Presentation into our UI by including the following lines in the presentation HTML’s HEAD element: <link rel=”help” href=”http://some.org/help.html”>, where the link points to the URL of your help file.

If your Presentation has any images, video or text in it, you can see these items in Design view, so you can accurately position your Placeholders around them. Sometimes your Presentation may be larger than the resolution of the computer you are editing it on. In this case, use your browser settings to zoom in and out of the Presentation to ensure you see everything that appears on the Display. The Editor and preview resize accordingly when you zoom in and out.

The Preview Bar appears across the top of a Presentation or Schedule preview. Across the top, you have these available options:

• Login: Logs you into the Rise Vision platform if you have an account. If you don’t, it asks you to log in with your Google account, and creates a Company and account for you.
• Copy Template: If the Presentation is a template, clicking this creates a copy of this Presentation in your own Company.
• Take the Tour: Clicking this brings up the Tutorial window, which contains several videos showing how to use the Rise Vision platform.
• Share: This gives you the option to share the preview via a shortened URL, or embed code for your own website.
• Email: Email the Presentation preview to anyone via this link.
• Tweet/Like: Share the Presentation preview on Facebook and Twitter.
• Banner: Click the banner to be taken to Rise Vision’s website for some info on what was displayed in the Banner.
• Hide/Show: Shows or hides the Preview Bar.

If you would prefer not to see the Preview Bar, simply add &showui=false to the end of the preview URL, and refresh. If the preview is not opened in Google Chrome, you’ll see a message stating “For the Best Viewing Experience Please Use Google Chrome”. You can download Google Chrome from here.

Add some Placeholders to your Presentation, and fill them with Playlist Items

1. Click Add Placeholder which will open the Placeholder dialogue. Enter the Width, Height, Top and Left position in pixels, or just use your mouse to drag the Placeholder to any location or size you want it to be. If you want your Placeholder to maintain its aspect ratio while you are resizing it, hold the Shift key while moving your mouse to resize, and it maintains the set aspect ratio. To rename the Placeholder from its default name, click Rename.
2. To choose “when” this Placeholder is visible, click Edit next to Timeline and pick your schedule preferences or just go with the default “Always”. To choose “where” this content shows up click Edit next to Distribution and pick the Displays you want or just go with the default “All Displays”.
3. Next pick a Transition, which controls how the items in your Playlist “transition” from one to the next or just go with the default “None”.
4. If you like, you can add a background image or color to your Placeholder.  Click Edit to choose a background color via the Color Picker, or enter a background image that is accessible via URL. If your image does not fill the entire Placeholder, you can choose the image position, have it scale to fit, or have it repeat in a tile format vertically and/or horizontally. Now let’s get to adding some content.
5. Right click on any of the Placeholders in your Presentation, and choose “Properties”, because it’s time to create a Playlist. Click Add in the table at the bottom to add Gadgets, Text, Presentations, Images or Video (Don’t know what Gadgets are? Click here).
• Gadget: When adding a Gadget, “Shared Gadgets” are displayed by default. You can click “Your Gadgets” to select one that you have created in your Company, or add a Gadget “By URL”. Click the Select link beside the Gadget that you want to add and the Item dialog for the chosen Gadget is shown. If you prefer, give it a custom name rather than using the default name. In the Duration field specify the number of seconds you want the Gadget to appear, or just go with the default of 10 seconds. For Gadgets like the YouTube Gadget, selecting “Play Until Done” will ensure it shows the entire video. Once you add your Gadget, if it is the only item or the first item in the Placeholder, you’ll see the name of the Gadget show up in its assigned Placeholder when in Design view.
• Text: Choose the Text option and give your text item a name, or stick with the default of “Text Item”. In the Duration field specify the number of seconds you want the text to appear, or just go with the default of 10 seconds. You can enter text using the Text Editor in the Design view or by using elements of HTML in the HTML view, check out this page for some interesting stuff you can do to your text in HTML. Once you add your text, if it is the only item or the first item in the Placeholder, you’ll see it show up in its assigned Placeholder when you are in Design view.
• Presentation: Choose the Presentation option and give your Presentation item a name, or stick with the default of “Presentation Item”. Next, enter the Presentation ID, which is found at the bottom of the Presentation Settings window. In the Presentation you want to insert or “embed”, click the Settings icon next to the name of the Presentation to find the ID.  In the Duration field specify the number of seconds you want the Presentation to appear, or just go with the default of 10 seconds. Once you add your embedded Presentation, if it is the only item or the first item in the Placeholder, you’ll see the text “Presentation Item” show up in its assigned Placeholder when in Design view.
• Image: Choose the Image option, and give your image item a name, or stick with the default of “Image Item”. In the Duration field specify the number of seconds you want the image to appear, or just go with the default of 10 seconds. Enter the URL path to your image, if preferred a background color, and if you want the image to scale to fit the Placeholder. Once you add your image, if it is the only item or the first item in the Placeholder, you’ll see it show up in its assigned Placeholder when you are in Design view. Remember that your image must be accessible via URL.
• Video: Choose the Video option, and give your video item a name, or stick with the default of “Video Item”. The video types that are supported are MP4 (H.264 encoded), MOV (H.264 encoded), and FLV. Videos play for their entire duration. Enter the URL path to your video, and choose the volume, the default is 100. Choose whether you want the video controls visible. Once you add your video, if it is the only item or the first item in the Placeholder, you’ll see the first frame of the video show up in its assigned Placeholder when you are in Design view. Remember that your video must be accessible via URL, and it scales to fit the Placeholder without sacrificing the aspect ratio of the video. Videos are cached on the Display so they do not need to download every time the Presentation starts, but an Internet connection is required when the Display starts up. Video items do not support carry on functionality, which means you can’t go to a different item, and then return to the middle of the video.
6. If you want to copy a Playlist item to the same Playlist, a different Placeholder, or even a different Presentation, click the Add button to the right of the item, then Copy. Navigate to where you want to put the Playlist item, click Add again and then choose Paste. This pastes the Playlist item complete with all Timeline, Distribution and settings you have entered.
7. Just as you can for any Placeholder, you can further refine the Timeline and Distribution for each Playlist item to precisely control “when” and “where” it shows up.
8. Once you’re done adding Playlist items, click Save to save the Playlist in the Placeholder, and then save the Presentation. The items “play” in the order they are listed in the Playlist and you can change that order by clicking the blue up/down arrows located beside each item to move it up or down in the list. You can remove all items from a Playlist within a Placeholder by clicking “Clear List”.

Another feature of the Rise Vision platform is what we refer to as “Content Sync”. If you have items in a Presentation that all play for the same amount of time, they transition to the next Playlist item in that Placeholder at the same time. If you have a video or a Gadget that is set to Play Until Done, the Placeholder that has the video or Gadget marked as Play Until Done does not sync up with the other Placeholders. Here are 2 examples that describe content sync:

• You have 2 Placeholders in your Presentation, each with 5 Playlist items, and each item plays for 10 seconds. When the Playlist items transition from one to the next, they transition at the same time.
• If you add a video or a Gadget that is marked as Play Until Done to one of the Placeholders, the items will no longer be in sync when they transition from one Playlist item to the next.

Searching and Sorting your Presentations

There are a number of ways you can search and arrange data on the Presentations page. You can search for a single character, which will retrieve all Presentations that start with that character, or you can search where the term is found in the middle of the name; For example searching for “Presentation” will retrieve “Bob’s Presentation”. Searches are not case sensitive, and searching for “template” will retrieve all Template Presentations, searching for “revised” will retrieve Presentations in the Revised status, and finally searching for “published” will retrieve all Presentations in the Published status. Press Search or hit the Enter key on your keyboard to start the search, and pressing the “x” button will clear the search box. The list of Presentations is sortable by the up/down arrow next to each column header, and if you have more than 50 Presentations, scroll to the bottom of the page, and more Presentations will be displayed. By default, 50 results are displayed at a time, and older results are kept within the list when new ones are loaded.

Before you can go ahead and Schedule your Presentation to appear on a Display, you first have to add a Display to Schedule it with. Click here to find out how.

Get into the Nitty Gritty HTML

If you want to take your Presentation beyond our admittedly simple Editor then don’t let us stop you. Point your web designers and developers towards the HTML tab in the Editor to have them customize the Presentation HTML code to meet your exact requirements.

Presentation Design Best Practices

We’ve included some best practices for Presentation Design here that you may want to take into consideration.

Presentation Gallery

Want to see all of our Template Presentations with screenshots and info about each? Check them out in the Presentation Gallery.

Template Presentations

To make it easy for you to customize a Template Presentation for your company we have included a Help page for each Template below:

• Campus Concierge Presentation
• Central University Presentation
• Company Profile Presentation
• Find it (Directory) Presentation
• Foursquare Presentation
• Guide Wall Presentation
• Like What’s in Your Cup? Presentation
• Medical Niche Presentations
• Network Operator Dashboard Presentation
• Our Company Presentation
• Picturesque Presentation
• Restaurant Niche Presentations
• Rise Vision Demonstration Presentation
• Rise Vision Start Page Presentation
• Showcase Presentation
• Sports Presentations
• The Channel Presentation
• The Markets Presentation
• The Show Presentation
• User Operator Dashboard
• Rise Vision Background Templates