Comdex/Fall Report: Viva Las Videos Multimedia Software Stars at Tech Trade Show Eric Grevstad
Mon 11/19/01 -- The biggest U.S. technology trade show was not so big this year. Between the slowdown in tech spending and the security concerns that ringed the Las Vegas Convention Center with metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs, last week's Comdex/Fall drew only about half the crowd of its peak a couple of years ago.
Nor did the likes of IBM, Intel, and Dell have their usual big booths on the show floor; Microsoft had its perennial prime spot at the main entrance, simultaneously courting Windows XP consumers and .Net developers, but its biggest crowds were lined up to play with the new Xbox game console.
But that doesn't mean there weren't cool new products to be seen -- and with hardware vendors cutting back, software was somewhat more prominent than at past Comdexes. WinPlanet was there to welcome new arrivals and spot trends, though the biggest trend didn't take much spotting: Digital video and still cameras are blurring the line between mainstream productivity and multimedia authoring. Just as today's Word and WordPerfect can do things once limited to specialized desktop publishing or page-layout programs, tomorrow's everyday tasks will include tools resembling Adobe Premiere, or at least Windows Movie Maker.
Don't believe it? Microsoft introduced a free (roughly 24MB) download for Office XP Standard and Professional users, Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 2002, designed to help businesses create streaming media presentations that synchronize audio, video, slides, and images for viewing over the Internet or a company intranet via a Web browser.
Producer can import AVI, MPEG, WAV, MP3, GIF, JPEG, HTML, and Windows Media files (but not Apple QuickTime files) as well as existing PowerPoint presentations with any animations or effects therein, and capture video from a DirectShow-compatible camcorder or VHS deck. The program then uses a timeline interface to help users synchronize audio and video with still images, HTML pages, and slides; create and switch among Web page layouts for online presentations; and publish finished projects to their hard disks, from which they can be copied to a Web server or burned onto a CD.
Producer automatically creates a clickable table of contents from slide titles, and plays its shows on any PC with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher browser and Windows Media Player 6.4 or higher (7.0 recommended).
If you've got a Webcam or camcorder, you can make an even more impressive presentation with Visual Communicator, due in January from a startup called Serious Magic (whose founders' credentials include the popular Play Snappy video capture device and Video Toaster TV-studio editor).
The $99 program gives you two of the key tools of your local TV news anchor -- a smooth-scrolling teleprompter from which to rehearse and read your sales, training, or other script, and an array of titles, graphics, and special effects (intuitively linked to words in your script, not frames or intervals in a timeline). A $139 version comes with a 4 by 5-foot "green screen" or chroma-key backdrop that can silhouette you, weatherman-style, against any background image. The company says Visual Communicator shows are compact enough to burn to CDs, post on Web sites, or send as e-mail attachments ranging from online auction product tours to video resumes.
Put It on Disc
With all these amateur or casual-user multimedia show tools cropping up, professional-class packages have had to grow even stronger, as Sonic Solutions promises it's done with version 2.5 of DVDit. In addition to supporting Windows XP and new CD and DVD recorders such as Hewlett-Packard's dvd100i DVD+RW drive, the program boasts a new compression engine for converting AVI and QuickTime files to DVD MPEG format in faster than real time.
Sonic has also cut 40 percent from DVDit's price -- the mainstream SE version is now $299 and the PE edition, which adds extras like Dolby Digital stereo support and output to DLT, is $599. In addition, the company has refreshed its consumer-level personal video package, MyDVD 3 ($149), with the ability to record from a camcorder or VCR directly to a DVD burner, adding menus and buttons for each video clip on the fly, as well as more painstaking drag-and-drop authoring and the ability to re-edit DVDs on the disc.
Frankly, with all this video-editing power within consumers' reach, programs that let you arrange your digital camera's still images into a slide show with music or narration, then burn them to a CD-R or CD-RW, look like a dime a dozen. We attended one press reception for Kodak's "Picture Friendly" partners where SimVentions' PhotoVisor ($30), QSound's AudioPix ($25), Totally Hip Software's LiveSlideShow ($50), Callisto Corp.'s PhotoParade, and Enterprise Corp. International's tvCD all sort of blurred together ... especially since Microsoft now offers a CD Slide Show Generator as part of its free PowerToys for Windows XP add-on package.
On the other hand, we confess we sort of liked Reallusion's CrazyTalk 2.0, which lets you turn a single digital-camera snapshot of yourself, publicity photo of Janet Jackson, or other headshot into an animated "talking head" -- you simply identify the mouth, eyes, and eyebrows, with no need for two or more shots as other animated avatar programs require. The $40 standard edition lets you sync the animated face (with over 20 available expressions) to either your recorded voice or a text-to-speech reader for local viewing or e-mailing; the $80 Web Edition lets you post it as an element of a Web page.
Speaking of capturing images, TechSmith Corp. showed updated versions of its still-image and video-clip capture utilities. SnagIt 6.0 ($40) goes light-years beyond pressing Print Screen for Windows screen capture, supporting DirectX to capture game images, stills from DVD playback, and layered or translucent on-screen windows. SnagIt can also nab every image on a Web page simultaneously (including pages too big to fit on your display), and images on pages linked to the primary page.
While SnagIt can capture simple on-screen motion of an application to an AVI file, Camtasia 3.0 ($150) is TechSmith's ultimate training or videoconferencing screen video recorder, supporting all three major desktop viewers (QuickTime, Windows Media, and RealPlayer) and producing highly compressed video files suitable for streaming at low bandwidths.
