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IMPORTANT NOTICE - There are several major issues with VideoPaper Builder. View our Known Issues page for descriptions of the issues and work-arounds.
Check that QuickTime is installed and functioning properly. Follow these steps:
Unistall and reinstall the Java Runtime Environment (this has been a fix for PCs running Windows 2000)
If you are trying to import a text file to VPB and it is not appearing properly, make certain that it is an HTML file. To do this, check the file extention (.htm or .html); try viewing it in your Internet browser.
If it appears properly, there may be a problem with the HTML code. To make certain that this is the problem, try importing a very basic html file, such as this (copy and paste into a txt file and save with the extention of .html):
<html>
<head>
<title>Test HTML</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<p>Document text sample here. Does it appear correctly?</p>
</body>
</html>
If this file appears correctly in both your browser and in VPB, then there is a problem with your HTML file. The most likely problem is this:
Several HTML converters/editors will add 'invisible' code to pages that are being converted from regular text. This code cannot be seen when viewing in a browser, but some of it does conflict with VPB 2.
For example, a sample 'blank' HTML page from Dreamweaver or converted from Microsoft Word might look like this when viewed in a text editor(although be completely blank when viewed in a browser):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
please note the difference from the 'blank' basic HTML page from before:
_______
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
_______
This is very easy to fix. After converting your text documents to HTML, open the new .html document in a text editor. Delete the following tags, or ones that look like them:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
This should solve the problem of text files not appearing in VPB.
When saving your final Quicktime video and placing it in your VideoPaper folder, make certain to save it as a self-contained file. To do this, open your video. Under "File", choose "Save As". In that dialog box, give your video a new name and check the "Save as Self Contained File" box. This will
save a copy of your video that does not include links to other elements that you my have imported into it (captions, cut-and-pasted segments, images, etc.) It is tempting to save a "referenced" file, because of the much lower file size, but don't be fooled: a "referenced" file is only small because it does not contain all the necessary information; this will lead to headaches later on when trying to publish your videopaper!
Several users who are running Windows XP have been able to fix their difficulties by re-installing the correct java runtime environment.
VideoPaper Builder requires Java Runtime Environment 1.3 or greater. It can be obtained from Sun at:
http://www.java.com/en/index.jsp
The most likely answer is that VPB exports edited copies of your text pages into a new folder; because your Style Sheet is not a page that you would import into VPB, or link to as a content page, VPB did not copy that file into the new folder. Therefore, the link from the HTML pages which reference it has been broken. If you copy the Style Sheet file into the export VP folder, the link should be fixed and your formatting should appear correctly.
There are no constraints on length of video for VPs, at least, not constraints placed by the the software. The constraints are those of space(memory), download time, computer speed, etc. Generally, authors have used short clips (approx 5-15 minutes) in their VPs; these files are compressed to be as small files as possible (for example, 50-250 MB) in order to fit on CDs. "Compression" has less to do with the length(timeframe) of a video as it does with the video's content; for example, is the camera moving a lot? Are there people moving around? Does the background change continually? These things add neccesary information to your video file, and thus, add to the total file size. When providing video to be viewed via the Internet, files need to be compressed down to very small file sizes, for example, under 50 MB, although even that is still comparatively huge and potentially very painful(or impossible) for a viewer using a modem. For modem users, 5 MB is generally a good target maximum size. Also, watch your screen pixel ratio/size-- video exported at 320x240 pix size is generally a useful default size for inclusion in VPs.
There are lots of ways to change this, if you are interested in tweaking exported code. See the User Community Forums for suggestions and information on different ways of including other media.
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