There’s Got to be a Better Way!

Today I started working on a project I have been putting off for some time. Starting with Purdue’s Maymester class in Intro to Entrepreneurship & Innovation (ENTR200K), I intend to video the lectures and make same available online. Seems straightforward - set up someone to run a video camera, mildly edit the beginning and ending of the raw video, and send it off to a video hosting site such as viddler.com, vodpod.com, or blip.tv. Lastly post or embed the resulting link and you have completed the operation. Sounds like a simple problem that should have a parsimonious solution, right?

Not so. Quite often profs/lecturers (me) use PowerPoints or other tools in their lectures. I want a system that shows both the video and PowerPoint on one screen, with the PowerPoints sync’d with the video. Not too much to ask, is it? Synching video with PowerPoints requires additional processing beyond that above. What to do? Being certain that a software solution to the “challenge” is available off-the-shelf, I did a Google and found several companies providing “solutions.” 

Altus learning systems has a product called “vPresenter” that really looks good. Click on the link, then the “VoD” tab at the top right to view a coordinated presentation by Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics. Really Cool! So far so good. So I found the Altus web site, went to the “contact” tab, and send a email requesting information to sales@…….; the email bounced. Lesson number one for entrepreneurs - potential customers MUST be able to contact your sales department! 

Off again to Google where I found a software package called OnCue by a company named Impatica. Impatica provides the means to download an evaluation copy of OnCue, which I did. First stumble - you have to download and install their Impatica for PowerPoint to use OnCue. Ok, so I downloaded and installed both packages and fired up OnCue. I couldn’t load a video - seems only mov, m4v and avi video extensions are supported, not something I normally work with on a Windows machine-but not a deal breaker. What really frosted me, was their installation required installing QuickTime 6.5..; I have the latest QT 7+ installed to support iPod etc. After digging in their pdf manual, I found a “sorry about that” statement that 6.5 is required, and that they were working on a fix for QT7. I’m not taking QT7 off my main machine, so now I will have to go through the double installation including the entry of Microsoft-like serial numbers to progress only to the stage of being able to input a video - that’s after converting my input to mov/m4v/avi - and the resultant hugh file sizes. But it’s not over yet. OnCue wants your video size to be a measily 120X160 - video runs in a small window in the top right of the screen. Go to their site and check it out for yourself. Not another deal breaker, but details, details, details! What happened to drag and drop??????

Aside from that, the whole deal of synching ppts to video is not just plug and play. The ppts have to be prepared in a certain way prior to using their PowerPoint software to convert to their unique input to OnCue. Then timing scripts (text files) have to be prepared, to do the actual synching. I can see that this is going to turn into a real time consuming deal. As time permits, I’ll plug away @ it.

For would-be entrepreneurs, this is a problem waiting to be solved - a software solution that even dumb college professors can use to sync their videos and ppts. Go for it.