Presentation Fun

No, that’s not a typo for “presentations are fun” (or even “presentations should be fun”), it’s then of some new software we’ve been playing with for a week or so from Presentation Fun. (I flagged up that we were doing this in last week’s blog.)

So what is it?  Well let’s get the cost out of the way – what it’s not is expensive, at under $40.

But what else is it?

It’s a lightweight package for creating short videos that you can embed on your website. Obviously you can do other things too, but that’s the clear intention of the writers. You can record straight from your webcam if you want to, and position that within the canvas (they call it a Stage) so that you can add things you’re talking about, such as text, images and so on.

Good news

The cost is good news – and there’s plenty more good news (although I’m going to get onto the bad news later on).

Some simple comments first.

It works – I’ve not found any bugs and installation was a snap (but hey, we’re on Macs, so it would be!) I’ve not tested installation on a Windows machine but bug free software is definitely a plus.

It’s easy to use – I was playing for less than 30 seconds before I caught on to the big idea behind it. That’s got to be a good thing – no huge learning curve! And okay, this video is hardly a work of art but it’s better than nothing! :)   (Forgive me looking so bad – it was the weekend and I miiiiigh have had a bottle or so of red wine on Friday night! :)

[media width=”400″  link=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMC_1nunTko&feature=g-up”]

Now obviously that’s not the best example of a video to be included in a website, and I’d not dream of doing so, because it’s too ‘amateur’ but that’s kind of the point – it’s so very, very easy to create things… and besides, it’s fun.

Bad news

There’s no abort button.  If I realise I’ve completely messed up the stuff I’m recording I’ve got no choice but to hit ‘stop’, wait, and start again.  Even the tiniest bit of editing facility would make this a much more useable package. In mitigation, one could remember that the maximum length of these vids is so short that this can’t matter and it’s as easy to start again as it would be to edit! :)

There’s also one big bit of something missing in the ‘how to’ of all of this: to make an object appear you simply double-click on it and it woooshes onto the screen. Now that I know to double-click it’s blindingly obvious, of course, but until I did it by accident I thought I had to drag it onto the stage are manually and that was going to be a deal breaker for me.  As it is, things flying in from the side (or below) the stage looks pretty amateur in some way.  Some kind of fading in would be an obvious next step in the development.

And in the balance?

Great for what it is – fun and harmless – and a lot of fun at that. On the downside, it’s not as powerful or as flexible or as professional as me having spent the same amount of time using (say) Keynote or iMovie on my Mac to get a more professional, slicker product. But maybe that misses the point because to do that I’d have to know how to use these packages already – whereas with this little bundle I can work something up from scratch in the same amount of time.

I guess that makes it a matter of presentation-horses for presentation-courses! If you want fun, this is fine – better than fine in fact – but if you want slick, this isn’t the best way to go.