Vara Software's VideoCue Pro serves to create videocasts easily and quickly. Vara's other software, screencast application ScreenFlow, has a unique interface of which it is immediately clear how to use it to its fullest. VideoCue needs a bit more preparation, but it does come with a bonus: one of the best teleprompters I've ever seen.Often smaller developers come up with the best ideas. They simply seem to be more creative in the way they think than the large teams of people who sit together and try to come up with good, new stuff at those moloch companies like Adobe and even Apple for that matter (although Apple may be regarded as an exception to the rule).
Vara Software is not that big. It’s a small company, and it has only a few applications, but it did merit an Editor’s Choice with its ScreenFlow program earlier, and it is dangerously close to getting another Editor’s Choice for its VideoCue Pro program—if the rule didn’t prescribe an Editor’s Choice can only be given to a product that I had the opportunity to compare with its equal, it would.
VideoCue is a program that lets you record video using an iSight or a camcorder and publish the result directly to a web site using Atom or some other syndication protocol. VideoCue Pro was first and foremost intended to help bloggers get professional-looking videocasts online quickly, but my testing showed it’s actually capable enough to be used by small cross-media publishers—I’m thinking of 5 to 10 people having access to a copy of VideoCue here.
The reason why I think that, is due to the feature set and the ease-of-use VideoCue has to offer. VideoCue Pro has a full-featured interface. As I said in my intro, it’s not as good-looking as ScreenFlow’s, but it’s efficient and effective, and that’s what matters most. Its workflow is deceivably simple: you enter text in the prompter section at right, right-click in the right-hand column in the teleprompter area to add a title layer (if you want a title, anyway), and drag your camcorder or iSight thumbnail from the Media panel at bottom-left.
Titles, Masks, Transition Effects: drag and drop to add them to your videocastThen rehearse your speech—even with a teleprompter of which you can easily change the speed, it’s not really easy if you’re not used to reading the news—and when you’re satisfied, start recording. After recording has finished, you’re prompted to save your video to disk or publish it to your web site in one move. Atom is one of the protocols you can use to publish a videocast easily.
VideoCue Pro comes with a decent number of titles that you can easily add text to, transition effects to create visual interests if you’re changing cameras or inserting images in-between snippets of text, and masks to make your recording visually even more interesting. I had only one element of criticism: the titles are all pre-defined and you can’t add titles to the Title panel by dragging from the desktop—I tried—unless you’re willing to open the application (in the Finder, right-click the application icon, and select “Show Package Contents”) and add images to the nested folder where the title images are located.
However, I’m not sure that you wouldn’t be breaking VideoCue by doing that, so I strongly advise against it. It would be nice, though to add your logo to VideoCue’s Title panel, because then you would have it available to you all the time. You can drag images in the Title area of your current videocast, though, so it’s not as big a deal as you might think at first.
The VideoCue Pro teleprompter is an example of how well this application has been thought out. It can be made to move faster or slower by either dragging the slider from the tortoise icon to the rabbit icon or by tapping the up or down arrows on an extended keyboard. You can constantly change the speed as you read, so reading from the screen doesn’t make you sound like a robot.
The only grudge I have against the teleprompter is that I can’t seem to find a good place to anchor my iSight without being visibly busy looking at a computer screen instead of the camera itself. By trying out varying positions, I learned that you really must keep a rather big distance between you and the camera in order for people not to get the idea you’re actually reading from screen.
It’s the way a TV studio is set up: the news anchor sits at a fair distance from the camera with the teleprompter below the camera. That’s perfectly alright for publishers, who are increasingly venturing into broadcast and all it takes, anyway.
To publishers on a budget, I can only say: take a look at VideoCue; it’s definitely worth its price.
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VideoCue Pro
Vara Software's VideoCue Pro serves to create videocasts easily and quickly. Vara's other software, screencast application ScreenFlow, has a unique interface of which it is immediately clear how to use it to its fullest. VideoCue needs a bit more preparation, but it does come with a bonus: one of the best teleprompters I've ever seen.Often smaller developers come up with the best ideas. They simply seem to be more creative in the way they think than the large teams of people who sit together and try to come up with good, new stuff at those moloch companies like Adobe and even Apple for that matter (although Apple may be regarded as an exception to the rule).
Vara Software is not that big. It’s a small company, and it has only a few applications, but it did merit an Editor’s Choice with its ScreenFlow program earlier, and it is dangerously close to getting another Editor’s Choice for its VideoCue Pro program—if the rule didn’t prescribe an Editor’s Choice can only be given to a product that I had the opportunity to compare with its equal, it would.
VideoCue is a program that lets you record video using an iSight or a camcorder and publish the result directly to a web site using Atom or some other syndication protocol. VideoCue Pro was first and foremost intended to help bloggers get professional-looking videocasts online quickly, but my testing showed it’s actually capable enough to be used by small cross-media publishers—I’m thinking of 5 to 10 people having access to a copy of VideoCue here.
The reason why I think that, is due to the feature set and the ease-of-use VideoCue has to offer. VideoCue Pro has a full-featured interface. As I said in my intro, it’s not as good-looking as ScreenFlow’s, but it’s efficient and effective, and that’s what matters most. Its workflow is deceivably simple: you enter text in the prompter section at right, right-click in the right-hand column in the teleprompter area to add a title layer (if you want a title, anyway), and drag your camcorder or iSight thumbnail from the Media panel at bottom-left.
Titles, Masks, Transition Effects: drag and drop to add them to your videocastThen rehearse your speech—even with a teleprompter of which you can easily change the speed, it’s not really easy if you’re not used to reading the news—and when you’re satisfied, start recording. After recording has finished, you’re prompted to save your video to disk or publish it to your web site in one move. Atom is one of the protocols you can use to publish a videocast easily.
VideoCue Pro comes with a decent number of titles that you can easily add text to, transition effects to create visual interests if you’re changing cameras or inserting images in-between snippets of text, and masks to make your recording visually even more interesting. I had only one element of criticism: the titles are all pre-defined and you can’t add titles to the Title panel by dragging from the desktop—I tried—unless you’re willing to open the application (in the Finder, right-click the application icon, and select “Show Package Contents”) and add images to the nested folder where the title images are located.
However, I’m not sure that you wouldn’t be breaking VideoCue by doing that, so I strongly advise against it. It would be nice, though to add your logo to VideoCue’s Title panel, because then you would have it available to you all the time. You can drag images in the Title area of your current videocast, though, so it’s not as big a deal as you might think at first.
The VideoCue Pro teleprompter is an example of how well this application has been thought out. It can be made to move faster or slower by either dragging the slider from the tortoise icon to the rabbit icon or by tapping the up or down arrows on an extended keyboard. You can constantly change the speed as you read, so reading from the screen doesn’t make you sound like a robot.
The only grudge I have against the teleprompter is that I can’t seem to find a good place to anchor my iSight without being visibly busy looking at a computer screen instead of the camera itself. By trying out varying positions, I learned that you really must keep a rather big distance between you and the camera in order for people not to get the idea you’re actually reading from screen.
It’s the way a TV studio is set up: the news anchor sits at a fair distance from the camera with the teleprompter below the camera. That’s perfectly alright for publishers, who are increasingly venturing into broadcast and all it takes, anyway.
To publishers on a budget, I can only say: take a look at VideoCue; it’s definitely worth its price.