What is PowerSprite™?

Who can benefit from PowerSprite? Why is animation important?

I can import movies into PowerPoint as it is. How is PowerSprite better?

Will PowerSprite remain necessary upon the release of the next version of MS Office?

What about animated GIFs (“clip art”)? How does PowerSprite compare?

Do PowerSprite-enabled presentations require PowerSprite to be viewed?

I don’t know how to create movies and animations. Can I still use PowerSprite?

Can I use PowerSprite to bring in QuickTime, Flash or movies in some other format?

What are the system requirements?

What can I do to improve the performance of my presentations?

PowerSprite is a sophisticated extension of Microsoft PowerPoint® which enables high-quality animations, video clips and effects to be seamlessly embedded in PowerPoint presentations. PowerSprite removes many of the limitations inherent in working with animations in PowerPoint – see here for more details.

Anyone who creates presentations using PowerPoint can benefit from PowerSprite. With lively, dynamic content you can convey complex messages more clearly and create stunning visuals that will leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Even if you don’t have access to unique animations and movies, you can make immediate use of PowerSprite’s bundled effects, clips and text animations. On the other hand, creative professionals will rely on PowerSprite to import into PowerPoint content created in advanced applications such as Adobe After Effects®, Adobe (Macromedia) Studio MX™, Autodesk 3ds Max®/Maya®, Softimage|XSI™ or any other video or animation suite.

PowerPoint’s handling of movie files – including Flash .swf content – is inherently limited. Some of the key issues are listed below. PowerSprite overcomes all of those limitations. Those aren’t mere technicalities: enabling animations to respect transparency and overlapping text opens up an incredible range of creative possibilities and enables huge time and cost savings in presentation production and maintenance.

1. No transparency: you can’t have anything behind the movie show through, and that includes your background settings, images, text, or anything else. The movie will display in an unsightly rectangle even if it contains transparency (alpha channel) information.

2. No text over video: you can’t have anything in front of the movie. Even if you use PowerPoint’s “Send to Back” or “Bring to Front” features to get text annotation, images or anything else show over the movie, they won’t. The external applications used by PowerPoint to render the movies slap it on top of all other slide elements.

3. Codec dependence: A movie which plays back fine on one computer may fail to play back on another due to missing components known as codecs. This is a constant source of frustration to users trying to communicate and share PowerPoint presentations which contain video file links.

4. No embedding: Movie files cannot be embedded inside a PowerPoint file; they have to remain as external links, often with poorly prepared path structures. This is another source of failure in sharing PowerPoint presentations.  

PowerSprite overcomes those limitations and others (such as the ability to rotate movies). PowerSprite animations support full alpha-channel transparency, they can play behind any other PowerPoint element, no codecs are required and - if necessary - they can be embedded directly in the presentation file.

Will PowerSprite remain necessary upon the release of the next version of MS Office?

To the best of our knowledge, absolutely yes. Information provided by Microsoft on the upcoming version of the Microsoft Office product suite, including PowerPoint, indicates numerous improvements but none that are directly related to PoewrSprite. At a recent conference (PowerPoint Live ’05), Microsoft representatives specifically indicated that overlapping text and video will not be possible in the coming release.

What about animated GIFs (“clip art”)? How does PowerSprite compare?

While animated GIFs do not suffer from some of the limitations associated with standard movie formats, they are severely restricted in other ways. Animated GIFs only support 256 colors, a single transparent color (which adversely affects anti-aliasing), and typically low frame rates. For those reasons they are invariably used for clunky, crude cartoon-style clips. While such clip art can be useful in some cases, it cannot support more sophisticated applications such as scientific and technical illustration or motion graphics and effects.

PowerSprite supports full 24-bit color (over 16,000,000 colors), a true 8-bit alpha channel (256 degrees of transparency) and high frame rates (24 fps and more). There is simply no comparison between the quality achievable with PowerSprite and that of Animated GIFs.

Do PowerSprite-enabled presentations require PowerSprite to be viewed?

Amazingly, no. Presentations created with PowerSprite can be exported to standard .ppt format which can be viewed with the standard PowerPoint application: no plug-ins are required, no codecs are necessary. Therefore, creative studios engaged in delivering PowerPoint presentations to clients can make free use of PowerSprite without worrying about the client having access to PowerSprite.

Please note that presentations containing “heavy” animations will require a relatively strong computer to ensure smooth playback.

I don’t know how to create movies and animations. Can I still use PowerSprite?

Sure. PowerSprite is bundled with numerous effects, clips and animated fonts that you can use right away in your productions. A growing amount of native PowerSprite content is available from us as well as from 3^rd parties.

And of course, there is a huge amount of movie and animation content available on the Web – just locate what you need and use PowerSprite’s import capabilities to convert it to PowerSprite format that can be embedded in your presentations. Please note that PowerSprite is not suitable for long or large videos.

Can I use PowerSprite to bring in QuickTime, Flash or movies in some other format?

The current release (PowerSprite 0.9 beta) is capable of importing image sequences at a variety of formats (.png, .jpg, .gif etc.) as well as .avi files. Future releases will natively support additional formats such as QuickTime and Flash. However, you may be able to use content in other formats with PowerSprite by transforming the movie into an image sequence. This can be done while retaining 100% image quality, full transparency etc. by simply using the .png format for the image sequence.

Specifically, you can do one of the following:

1. If you are the creator of the movie or animation file, you can typically export image sequences directly from the application you work in. Almost every video editing, animation and motion graphics application is capable of creating image sequences in a variety of formats.

2. If you have a movie file created elsewhere, you can use one of several applications to convert it into an image sequence. This may be done, for example, using Apple’s QuickTime 7 Pro, which only costs $29.99. Convert the movie into a .png sequence to preserve quality and transparency, or to .jpg for smaller file size.

What are the system requirements?

PowerSprite requires:

1. 1 GHz Intel Pentium III processor (or equivalent) or better (over 2GHz recommended)

2. Microsoft® Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2, Windows XP Professional or Home Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition or Windows 2003 Server

3. Microsoft® Office XP (2002) or better

4. 512 MB of RAM minimum, 1GB or more recommended for larger animations

5. 1024 x 768, 16-bit display

6. 300 MB of available hard-disk space

What can I do to improve the performance of my presentations?

PowerSprite stretches the capabilities of PowerPoint to their boundary and beyond, and may quickly reach your system’s limits. If you encounter slow behavior, consider the following:

1. Close other applications while working in PowerPoint with PowerSprite content.

2. Make sure you are viewing presentations at a resolution of 1024x768 or less (in PowerPoint, Go to Slide Show→Setup Show and select an appropriate resolution at the “Slide Show Resolution” dialog box). 

3. Use shorter and smaller animations. A strong system should be able to sustain movie files with over 800 frames (33 seconds at 24fps) at a resolution of 300x200 pixels, and a very capable modern workstation may go well beyond that. With an average laptop, however, it is advisable to remain well below those bounds.

4. Text animation is extremely demanding – only animate short phrases and words. 

5. Importing a large animation and scaling it down requires more resources than down-sizing the animation externally and importing it at the correct size. If possible, set up the movie source file to the correct size before importing.

6. Rotating the animation puts a significant burden on PowerPoint. Use rotations only on small animation clips, and if possible rotate the file at the source and import at the correct orientation.

7. Get more system RAM. PowerPoint pre-rendering approach takes up huge amounts of RAM, especially when PowerSprite objects are present. Use the Windows Task Manager, accessible via Ctrl+Alt+Del, to study PowerPoint’s memory usage. If it gets to over 80% of your system RAM you will need to reduce the size or length of PowerSprite animations, or increase your RAM.

8. During presentation creation and editing, stick to PowerSprite rep-frames and do not convert animations to standard PowerPoint format – leave this to the end.