So, if others are trying to do this, here is what we did that seemed to work. Created a duplicate audio track from the sidebar video BEFORE importing into Presenter. Imported video into sidebar, and imported audio using Presenter's audio import. Used the animation sync feature in the audio tab, then muted the video volume. Presenter is then using audio and video separately. It actually synched up perfectly.

The drawback is that video and audio can get out of sync, easily, especially if a participant manipulates the playback bar to fast forward, or does lots of pausing, etc. Let me know if you experiment with this and find a better way to do it.

Daniel

Daniel,

Very interesting approach!  But I'd suspect that in addition to losing some level of control (from the end user's perspective... i.e. synch issues), the other thing to keep in mind is that you're running the risk of ballooning your presentation; meaning that the file size can artificially increase due to concurrent media (your audio that is!).  But I don't want to take away, or minimize, the idea you have in order to synch visuals/graphics/text elements to your video file.

I would, however, recommend yet another approach.  Since most likely the video you'll use in your presentation will result in an flv file, you might take a look at using an FLV player which can be installed and run right on your desktop.  This way, you can actually create a "time code shotlist" which can help in determining when your animated elements need to appear.  No messing around with sychronized timings...just take a short trip to the Audio Editor...drag the animation flags in the timeline to the appropriate timecode and you're done!

Lee Brimelow had an FLV player on his site, but now I can't find it.  I did, however, find this link from another flash video resource on the net:

http://www.flashguru.co.uk/free-tool-flash-video-player

Hope that helps!

Rob