If you are a teacher or speaker and have your sessions videotaped, until now it wasn’t easy or inexpensive to produce a complete record of your talks. As someone who speaks frequently, I have been through the process of hiring a professional editing crew to mix the live video of my events and combine that with the materials that I use for my presentations.
That is about to change with a new video mashup service from Arctic Fox that allows you to do this yourself. This isn’t a video editing tool like the ones we wrote about earlier this week, but a service that will host and synchronize the live video with your PowerPoint slide deck so someone who wasn’t present at your event can still follow along. And it differs from services such as Slidehare.net, which just posts and shares your slide decks in the cloud.
The service is completely Web-based, and the steps are pretty simple. First, you upload your video file; most of the common formats are supported. Next, you convert your slides into a PDF and upload them too. Arctic Fox parses the individual slides out of the PDF and then asks you to put in the time code when the slides change. This is somewhat tedious, but it is useful for all speakers to review their videos anyway so this is as good a time as any to do that task too. Once you are done with the synchronization process, you finish up your project and can either embed this into your own Web page, or send people to a URL where your project is hosted on their site (You can see an example of one of my talks here, I haven’t finished with synching all the slides yet, but you can get an idea of what is involved with the screenshot below.)
The service is ideal for classroom instruction, where a teacher at a blackboard also wants to refer to online sources or other materials, as well as for those of us that use our slides and Web links during our talks.
There are various pricing tiers available, starting at $50 per month that includes up to 15 hours and 30 presentations, and goes up to $1000 per month for an unlimited account. There is a 14-day free trial to test out the service.
