Publishing Your Presentation

After polishing and previewing, it's time to publish. Start by clicking the Publish button in the Producer toolbar, which opens the screen shown in Figure 10.12.

Figure 10.12. Producer's Publish Wizard.

It's simple to publish onto your hard disk (for potentially transferring to CD) or to any place on your network where you have sharing rights. If you want to write directly to a Web server, it must be a Windows Media Services streaming server, either hosted by your organization, or by a third party. If you click Web Server in the Publish Wizard, a "Learn More" button appears which you can click to see a list of Producer-compatible service providers.

You can also post your presentation to Microsoft's SharePoint Services Web site or SharePoint Portal Server. For details on all these Web-based uploads, see the Microsoft white paper located here:

www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AFC52625-E1B6-4A1A-9EEB-106C878713CB&displaylang=en.

Choosing Encoding Parameters

After choosing your playback site, you'll page through a screen for posting information about the presentation and then a Publish Settings screen where you'll choose your encoding parameters. The default setting is optimized for your content, and will vary from project to project. If it's acceptable, click Next, otherwise check Choose Publish Settings for Additional Audiences, and then click Next to open the window shown in Figure 10.13. Here you have a number of options that require explaining.

Figure 10.13. Here's where you define your target audience and check other encoding parameters.

In the Windows Media Technology dropdown box, you can select Windows Media 9 codecs, Windows Media 8 codecs, or both. Use Windows Media 8 if you're concerned about playback compatibility with older computers, Windows Media 9 if your audience is exclusively Windows 98 SE and above on the Windows side, and OS X on the Mac, or you can choose both; in this case Producer will create different files for both codecs.

Check the Enable Rich-Media Streaming checkbox if you're streaming from a Windows Media Streaming server, and Producer will customize the encoded files automatically. If your audio is speech-only, check Optimize Compression for Audio Narration, and Producer will use a codec optimized for voice.

If you choose multiple target audiences, Producer will output multiple files and provide a viewer with different bitrate alternatives. Click Next and Producer displays the encoding progress screen (Figure 10.14) but won't actually begin encoding until you click Next again.

Figure 10.14. Click Next to start encoding.

Once the presentation is published, Producer will allow you to preview how the file will look in three different browsers: Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows, Internet Explorer 5.2.2 (or later) for Mac OS X, and Netscape Navigator 7.0 for Windows. I saw some minor differences, and suggest you test thoroughly if you're distributing to Macintosh and Netscape clients.