Figure 3 – Adobe 3D Reviewer - 3D Editing Tool

Including Video

With Acrobat 9 Pro Extended you can easily embed fully functional video into both MS and PDF documents. From within Acrobat you simply click the Multimedia pull down menu and select Flash tool, and in MS documents you use the Acrobat PDF Action Buttons shown in Figure 1. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended supports all the popular video formats, such as .mov, .mp4, and .wmf, and converts these to a light weight Flash format for inclusion in your document. Before embedding your video you can also choose the player’s look, feel and functionality, select a display image from any of the video’s frames, and size the video to fit neatly into your document. (I found that the best way to do embed video into MS Word is by creating a text box, sizing the video in the Video upload utility and dropping it into this box. This way you have full control over the video’s position on the page. )

Creating Dynamic and Portable Presentations

Adobe Presenter, included in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended allows you to create rich media on-demand presentations that can be published to a single PDF file, distributed and then played back by anyone who has the free Adobe Reader 9. You can even publish your finalized presentation in Flash .swf format, or you can simply publish and distribute your presentation on the web in PDF format.

The finalized presentation can include audio, video, interactive quizzes, and of course all the animation schemes and transitions that you’d expect from a standard PowerPoint presentation.

Figure 4 – A Rich Media and Portable Adobe Presenter Presentation

You create your presentation directly in PowerPoint with help from the Adobe Presenter options shown below and the Acrobat action buttons shown in Figure 1 where you can include all the functionality of PowerPoint, plus the added benefits of rich media content and PDF cross platform portability and web access.

Figure 5 – The Adobe Presenter Option Pallet in PowerPoint

Putting it all Together

Assembling your portfolio is the simply a matter dragging each of your files into the provided portfolio editor, choosing a layout, personalizing it by adding a welcome message and header that can include graphics, selecting a color scheme, specifying file details and publishing it to PDF format. I did it, and it only took a few minutes - the flow is extremely intuitive.

Figure 6 – The Portfolio Editor