Sand Hill Scientific Customer Training Portal
Publishing In order for your presentation to be viewed, you must Publish it to the StarCast System. In order to do so, you (or your employer or whomever provides you access to StarCast) must have a current, paid up StarCast Account. Then, you must have a StarCast login with Content Manager privileges.
Step 1 - Publish Click on the "Publish" button on the upper right hand corner of the StarCast recorder to begin the publishing process.
Selecting Slides to Publish and Editing Slide Titles The first screen of the Publishing Process shows you the name of the PPT file that will be uploaded, along with its size (you are limited to 25 MB for the PPT itself; your audio and embedded videos do not count towards that limit). You can also review all of your slide titles, embedded movies, and audio file sizes. Additionally you can select which slides have been updated, in order to speed up the process by not uploading slides that haven't changed.
Step 2 - Edit Slides View Larger Click to view in more detail.
  1. You are only shown up to 10 slides at a time. Use the forward and back buttons to review all the slides in your presentation if there are more than 10 slides.
  2. The titles shown initially are the titles as PowerPoint considers them. In many cases, there is no "Title" element on a slide, and these boxes are empty. The slide titles entered here are what will be seen when this course is viewed in StarCast. These titles will not affect your PowerPoint in any way.
  3. Once you have published a presentation once, the slide titles in the PowerPoint are ignored, on the assumption that you have labeled them the way you want them. If you change the titles in the PPT file itself, you will have to change them again here.
  4. If any of your embedded video files has been moved, renamed, or deleted, it's name will be shown in red. Click "Replace SWF" to find the correct file. You can also of course use this just to change which video is embedded.
  5. The checkbox next to each slide indicates whether or not that slide will be uploaded and converted. Note, however, that your entire PPT file must be uploaded every time. By unchecking a slide, you can avoid re-uploading embedded video and sound files, which can be quite time-consuming though. Additionally, those slides will not be converted, leaving the previous version(s) intact.
  6. During Publishing, Recorder double checks to make sure that previous versions of unchecked slides exist. In the case that a previous version does not exist, then that slide will be uploaded and converted after all.
  7. The checkbox in the upper left, ie not associated with any particular slide, will force all slides to upload or to not upload. You will be prompted whether you want to set all slides to upload (or not) so you won't accidentally lose your settings.
  8. You are limited to a total of 15,000 characters for the aggregate of your slide titles. This is enough for reasonable titles for up to 500 slides (all in one presentation--there is no limit across presentations).
When you are done reviewing your slide titles, embedded videos, and audio files, click "Publish Presentation" button at the top of the page to move on to the next step in the Publishing process.
Select Your Global After you move past the first screen, you will be presented a list of Globals for your StarCast site. For an explanation of StarCast Globals, please ask your StarCast Site Administrator. Select the appropriate StarCast Global for this presentation.
Globals List View Larger Click to view in more detail.
Provide User Name and Password At this point you must provide your user name and password to the global you have selected. If you have selected the wrong global, click the "Change Global" link placed under the "Login" button.
LogIn View Larger Click to view in more detail.
Select or Create Course On this page you can select an existing content item to publish your files to by clicking the gold "Overwrite" button, or else click on the "Add New" button to create new content.
LogIn View Larger Click to view in more detail.
Publish Power Point Once you have typed in or edited your course information click on the "Overwrite & Publish" button to begin converting your power point and audio into a web presentation.
LogIn View Larger Click to view in more detail.
Uploading to the Database You will be given a progress meter as your PPT, each OGG and embedded SWF file in turn is uploaded.
LogIn View Larger Click to view in more detail.
Conversion Queue Once all your files have finished uploading you may see a list of courses queued up for data conversion. Most presentations are converted within a few minutes. Some small percentage of presentations however can take much longer to convert; if you find it is taking more than about 10 minutes for your own presentation, you may wish to be more careful about converting only the slides that you have changed (by using the checkboxes on the Slide Title Review screen).
LogIn View Larger Click to view in more detail.
The Console at the bottom will show a bunch of code. Don't worry if you don't know what this says. It's merely a record of the process.
Publishing process complete At the end you will this screen and from here you may preview your presentation. You will also receive an email (at the address registered in your StarCast account for your user name) when your presentation is ready.
LogIn View Larger Click to view in more detail.