Software for Synchronizing Media Easily

Since the early 90s, when I and my colleague coordinated the development of multimedia strategies our over all goal and vision has been and remains making the creation of multimedia information pervasive among students and teachers. This means in practice that instead of using word processors and output predominantly text, students would routinely create information for informal and formal use that contains all the media including what can be the most challenging, video. While prices of hardware have come substantially down to make at least this part of the vision possible, software and ease of use still remain goals to reach. We are excited by tools like Web Cams, that cost less than $30.00. Software remains a challenge in terms of price, usability and function.

There are two pieces of software that represent progress in making the creation of multimedia information easier. The first is the Visual Communicator from Serious Magic, http://www.seriousmagic.com. It strives to make video production easier for the average person. It provides an easy to use interface to allow you to sequence media that you develop or get from another source. You can capture yourself with a Web Cam delivering a lecture that you can read on its included teleprompter. You can include other media using a drag and drop to an action panel interface. This can be your media that you create with other software tools. You can include Power Point charts by converting them to jpg or bmp images. Visual Communicator comes with professionally oriented templates and sample video effects, photographs, and audio. You can buy the more advanced version which includes a green screen, a large sheet of cloth, that you can place behind yourself and use functions of this software to replace this green screen with other video or photographs. The focus of this software is creating fancy video that can be published in various ways. The cost ranges from $99.00 to $350. For editing of media, you still need your media editing tools such as Sound Forge for audio or Microsoft Word for text.

The Microsoft Producer, http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoi... is another piece of software that tries to make synchronizing different media easier for the creator. This software has an excellent price, namely free, but it has a pre-requisite that is far from free, namely PowerPoint 2002. The focus of this software is creating fancy PowerPoint presentations with heavy emphasis on media other than text and particularly video. Layout is much more emphasized in this tool. There is not this concept of replacing a lecturer's background with other media s in Visual Communicator. This is not meant to be a standalone tool whereas Visual Communicator is. There is a tutorial at Microsoft Producer tutorial http://www.gonzaga.edu/Campus+Resources/...

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