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Serious Magic Vlog it! ($49.95) is a versatile video production package which includes everything you need to put a video program on the Web, including a teleprompter, capture facilities, and the ability to edit your production on the fly. After you're done with your performance, you're able to compress your video into your choice of formats. I spent lots of time putting the program through its paces, and I think it is an exceptional production facility in a box, perfectly suited for anyone who just wants to effortlessly publish some video on the Web.
The blog phenomenon has taken the Web by storm, and now it's moving along to its next level, incorporating audio with podcasts, and now video has entered the picture. Some call them video podcasts, and Serious Magic calls them video logs, or vlogs. Vlog It comes to the rescue for those who are uninitiated in the mysteries of video, making it easy for even neophytes to put together professional-looking productions.
It all looks easy from the start. When you first launch Vlog It, it greets you with a list of various looks from which to choose. The hard work has been done for you, and there is a list of 13 beautifully conceived the graphic looks that let you decide what style you'll use for your video.
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| Choose from lots of different styles for your video. |
Among the looks are antique, celebration, kid power, industrial, sports, ultramodern and high tech. These styles include a background, a lower-third look including specific typefaces for each one, and various graphic backgrounds associated with it.
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| In the next screen of the Vlog It Wizard, you choose how your opening titles will read, and then you see variations on the backgrounds, where there are three choices available for the lower-thirds and three for the background. |
There is even more, where you next choose the moving background, and then pick music, where you're allowed to audition each one before you commit to it. One thing I noticed at this point is that when you type in text, it automatically sizes to the screen, and as you type more characters, the role of text becomes smaller and smaller. This is a great idea, and it couldn't be any easier. Serious Magic is taken away a lot of the tedium of creating your own video production by removing the ability to change some things that are best left well enough alone.
Next you click finish, then you're into the main interface of the program which resembles that of Serious Magic's slightly more sophisticated production program, Visual Communicator. This is a good thing, because Visual Communicator pioneered the use of graphics which are tagged to text, and not necessarily to time. So what you do here is first insert your text in the teleprompter window, you can either type it in their directly or paste and text from any word processor.
Next, you drag and drop your graphics, text overlays, stills and videos onto the area next to the script, placing those elements exactly where in that script you would like them to occur. You're able to drag and drop stills, audio, the different parts of the production when you would like to be on camera, and videos into this area very easily. And, once you've dropped videos into the area, you can trim them as well, marking the in- and out-points, and even designating fades in and out of the audio. The only problem I noticed with this procedure of dragging and dropping video was when I tried to drag video files that were located elsewhere on our network here at the Midwest Test Facility. For some reason that confused Vlog it, and it promptly crashed, losing all of my work. Apparently the software is designed to use just local files and not those that are located elsewhere on a network.
It was easy to move graphics around and place elements throughout the script, and all ended up being perfectly-timed. It was also a cinch to shift things around, editing and tweaking along the way. I noticed that you can keep it very simple or you can get quite sophisticated with this software. Vlog It even does a great job of creating chromakeys, where the subject is shot against a blue or green screen and then that color is replaced by other stills or video. Through the whole operation, the most noticeable thing is how easy it all is to use. This is an exceptionally well-designed package, and can be used without even consulting the documentation, which is quite good, nonetheless.
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