Toufee - Flash movies made easy Thursday, March 20, 2008

When I first stumbled across Animoto last year I was delighted with the site for two reason
Of course, you were limited to the pre-set formats, but these were fine for amateur hacks like me, and most people seeing the results were astounded. Admittedly I only used Animoto to spice up sets of photos I'd taken at weddings, events etc for friends and family.

So when I read about Toufee, which claimed to be the easiest and fastest flash movie maker online, I thought it would be worth evaluating.

Ordinarily, if I want to put movies online I use Microsoft's free application, Window Movie Maker, to edit the video and add effects which I've always been happy with and offers a large range of output formats.

So looking at Toufee, my initial thoughts were that [despite a gawdy home page]
But then as I watched the demo video, whilst continuing to be impressed by the enormous set of features, it struck me that the application was a little like Powerpoint [and Windows Movie Maker] i.e. dangerous in the wrong hands.

Powerpoint has many animation and transformation tools to add effects, and many slide creators spend lots of time applying them to their slides. Unfortunately, you soon realise as a viewer that less is more in most cases and sometimes the creator has overshadowed the message content with gaudy effects [assuming the presentation had quality content at all!]. Even worse, given most people have seen every Powerpoint effect, they now appear tame and passée.

Hence, one can easily imagine the shabby results that will be created by most people. Indeed, the movie created in the Toufee demo looks tacky and a brief glance at the gallery of movies on the site, made by some of the 100,000+ users they claim, amplifies this point!

Unfortunately, there is no substitute for talent, creativity and design flair regardless of the tools - give me a block of marble, a hammer and chisel and you'd end up with a pile of rocks rather than a work of art, albeit it would probably get admitted to the Tate Modern based on the "tat" I saw in there recently.

So perhaps worth a try, but if you're thinking about using it to impress potential customers with your own home-cooked movie, I think you'd be better off getting the help of a designer. For the avoidance of doubt, let me stress that this is not a criticism of the site.

Toufee offers a 30 day free Trial means after which its $5 per month, but you do need to give your credit card details upfront.

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posted by John Wilson @ 8:54 AM Permanent Link ,

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Fiql - Your playlist in video Saturday, September 22, 2007

Fiql is a service that allows you to import your playlists from itunes, winamp, musicmatch, windows music player and rhapsody, then attempts to locate the accompanying music, lyrics and videos for the included tracks. You can do so many things on this site, including listen/watch the playlist of others. The site also provides blog facilities for users and "friending" options.

This a great service on so many levels.
- The site is very slick and the playlist/player is stylish
- Copyright issues appear to have been sidestepped since Fiql is finding content made available by others and playing that, in similar manner to Seeqpod
- Aside from friends, you can create/join groups of like minded folks
- Playlists can also be created on the fly as you peruse the choices of others
- You can comment on the music you hear throughout the site

Not sure what happens if the tunes in your playlist aren't available (other than they dont play!), but overall a really good site which I think I will be testing out in more depth.

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:43 PM Permanent Link ,

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How to easily make a demo video for a web app Thursday, January 04, 2007

The iscrybe video was really impressive (still not had an invite to use it) and it struck me that most services should consider using a demo video to introduce their service.

Of course, that's easy to say, but how easy would it be to actually do without incurring lots of expense.

Prompted by an article in the Web Worker Daily, it looks like it might be as simple as this:
1. Use Snagit or something similar to capture your PC screen activities (Snagit has a free trial). If you need to edit your video, you can use a free online service like Cuts
2. You can then overlay an audio commentary using Dubit (sadly its a desktop app, but its free)
3. You can then pull the video into Viddler and add global or timed tags/comments. These tags are then usable in search and navigation. Hence, you could put timed tags in when covering specific features of your webapp to highlight specific content.
4. The Viddler video can be embedded in other web sites, with the option to start the video at specific timed points

Alternates to steps 3 & 4, are to upload the video to a service like Blip.tv or even Youtube and then add tags via a service like Veotag or Mojiti but this is more long winded, albeit Mojiti has some neat effects you can play with.

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:12 PM Permanent Link ,

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Viddler could turn out to be the best video host this Xmas Sunday, December 24, 2006

After looking for a service that would let me upload large videos and then "deep tag"them, I may have found what I was looking for in Viddler , which is presently in beta.

You can upload many videos at once, and in various formats, too (.mov .avi .wmv .mpeg). You also don't have to worry about file size — you get an allowance of 500 Mb PER VIDEO.

Moments on the timeline of your video are taggable, so you can classify and share instances in time. Timed tags are searchable, too — this is really powerful.

When commenting, the position in the timeline of a video determines where it will be posted to, rather than having comments being attached to a whole video.

You can use Viddler to record footage directly from a web camera to the website, without installing any software.

The service streams video rather downloads it on a progressive basis, hence the ability to hop about within a video.

This could give many services a serious run for their money, combining large file sizes with in-video tagging. Why - well it means you can now
I know other services are already looking at providing similar capabilities - I got a call this week from CEO of one of the best hosting services, who are based in New York, about deep tagging. To introduce this will necessitate them migrating from progressive to streaming video - however he considered the cost of this to be relatively light with open source software now available to do the job. I suspect that Viddler may well accelerate their plans.

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posted by John Wilson @ 9:08 PM Permanent Link ,

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