As we all know, no project can really be accomplished in the budgeted time. SOMETHING will go wrong.
Earlier this week I set out to create a little, online slide show, with narration. It would be a marketing piece to send to a bunch of potential clients.
My plan was to use Audacity to create the soundtrack, Photoshop to create the bullet-slides and screenshots, then assemble the whole thing with iMovie, occasionally using the "Ken Burns" effect to add some motion.
I wish I had Apple's "Keynote" presentation software, especially the latest version, cause I hear it does this kind of thing real well. But iMovie is what I had, and what I knew, so onward.
The soundtrack came out just fine. Edited the narration, laid a piece of music under it, and exported to an mp3 file.
But when I assembled it in iMovie, and exported it to a stream-able movie, the image quality was really poor. Not acceptable, especially for potential clients.
I played with it for awhile, but it wasn't working.
Then I came up with the bright idea of assembling it as a Flash movie.
I have a really old version of the Flash dev-environment, which I never really learned. So I spent the past three days giving myself a crash-course, and dealing with the peculiarities of this 1999 software on my OS X Jaguar machine.
I think I've finally got it figured out. I've made 3-4 test versions, none of which is good enough, but each one represents some more learning. Now I'll start again, and I think I have a chance at producing a presentable Flash movie that I can send to my clients.
And as a bonus, I've added a little bit of Flash dev ability to the services I can offer.
Posted by jackhodgson at January 21, 2005 12:01 PM