Streaming Media - 2008 Industry Sourcebook - (Page 113) gimme five There’s no single “best” presentation system out there, but one of these five tools could be the right one for you. by Paul Riismandel w ith all of the advances in learning and education in the last 100 years, the lecture still reigns supreme. Sure, today’s lectures have been gussied up with video projectors showing bullet points and snazzy graphics. But at the end of the day you still have a lecture. And if your job is in elearning, whether in higher education or in the enterprise, odds are that you’re going to have to record some lectures. Make that a LOT of lectures. I don’t mean to be cynical. Lectures don’t have to be boring or torturous. The best teachers and presenters can make them exciting and fun. Likewise, those of us whose task it is to record those lectures and to deliver them online can make the video experience compelling and enjoyable. We’re past the days when panning the camcorder back and forth between the presenter and the projection screen is acceptable. In fact, with the tools now available to make presentation capture easier and better looking, I’d say there’s really no excuse for the point-the-cam-at-the-screen trick. So if you’re going to record presentations for internet delivery, you owe it to the presenter and the viewers to retain the quality of the experience—audio, video, visuals, and all, synchronized together into a single multimedia package in your browser. At one end of the spectrum are narrated screen capture utilities, such as TechSmith’s Camtasia, which combine a lecturer’s audio with video of everything on his or her computer screen. At the other end we have full-featured, enterprise-level capture systems, such as Echo 360, which automate the process of capturing the computer screen, video, and audio from multiple sources, synchronizing them together, and then publishing the final product to web and streaming servers. If all you really need to do is capture something along the lines of a so-called enhanced podcast with screenshots and audio, you don’t need something as sophisticated as Accordent’s Capture Station. Products such as Camtasia and Adobe’s Captivate offer relatively inexpensive ways to get your feet wet and to start producing content quickly (see reviews of each in the December WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 113 buyer’s guide http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM
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