Turn your Connect Pro meeting into a Parisian Cafe

  
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It is possible to customize your meeting room to make your meeting participants feel like they are meeting with you in a Parisian Caf or any location of your choosing. Here is a quick tutorial.

Becoming familiar with the 'room background' feature

By default, your meeting room background is grey or another color chosen by your account administrator. Using the room background feature, you can modify it.

When logged in your Connect Pro meeting room as a Host, you can access the 'Room background' options via: Meeting > Room Performance %26 Appearance > Room Background

The Room Background menu presents 2 options:

• Select Room Background : it enables you to select a file from the content library to serve as the background
• Clear Room Background : it enables you to reset the default background

The 'Select Room Background' option enables you to select a wide range of files: images (.jpg or .gif), flash animations (.swf), or flash movies (.flv). ﾠ

Creating that Parisian Cafe atmosphere

Visual background

The first step is to create a visual background. You need to have a picture of that parisian cafe terrace from your last vacation or from the Internet (with proper copyright of course).

Follow the following steps to set this picture as your room background:

• Log into the Connect Pro Central application.
• Go to the content library and upload your file, say cafe.jpg.
• Launch the Connect Pro meeting room where you want to modify the background.
• Select Meeting > Room Performance %26 Appearance > Room Background > Select Room Background.
• In the 'Browse Content' window, select 'My Content' and retrieve the file you uploaded, cafe.jpg.
• Click 'Open'.

The picture is now set as the background for the meeting room. ﾠ

Audio background

Wouldn't it be nice if you could add some of that background cafe noise? A mix of conversations, spoon tinklings and glass clinkings.

No problem: using Adobe Flash authoring, you can combine your image file with an mp3 and create a Flash animation file that you can play in loop.

You will need an audio file of that background noise. Unless you thought about recording sounds during your last vacation, you might find it difficult to find one. You can use the FreeSound project to find the noise you want (http://www.freesound.org).

In this case I will be using the Cafe Boursault sample from FreeSound (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=15899)

To create the Flash movie follow these steps:

• Open the Adobe Flash authoring tool and create a new ActionScript 2 Flash File and save you new file as Cafe.fla.
• Go to File > Import > Import to Stage and select the picture cafe.jpg
• Ensure that you have the property window open: go to Window > Properties and ensure the Properties option is checked.
• Click on the picture you just imported and look its size in the property window (for example 400 x 315)
• Click on the white background area and in the property window, set its size to that of the picture.
• Click on the picture again and set the X and Y position to 0 and 0.

You are now done with importing the picture, let's move to the audio now.

• First you will need to create a new layer. Go to Insert > Timeline > Layer. A new layer (layer 2) is added.
• In the time line select that layer and go to File > Import > Import to stage and select the audio file (you will need to convert it to mp3 beforehand).
• Save your project.
• Then go to File > Export > Export Movie.
• Give it a name like cafe.swf.
• In the export Flash Player menu, change the following parameters: set Version to Flash
• Player 8 and JPEG quality to 100.
• Click OK.

You now have your cafe.swf ready to be set as your room back ground. Follow the steps you used for the image you uploaded earlier as the background of your meeting room.

More ...

We looked only at how to set a fixed picture as background and adding sound to it. But it is also possible to set movies as background by uploading Flash Video files (flv).