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Ladies and gentlemen, start your lectures: ProfCast 2.3.0 arrives

by Steven Sande Jan 5th 2009 at 1:30PM

Educators and professionals who need to record and podcast lectures often turn to Humble Daisy's ProfCast, a tool for adding enhancements to PowerPoint or Keynote slideshows to create powerful podcasts.

ProfCast today received a major update to version 2.3. The original app allows recording of live presentations, syncing slides with an audio track, and full RSS feed generation and publishing support. The new version incorporates several improvements, the most significant being support for PowerPoint 2008.

The app now automatically detects whether Keynote or PowerPoint is being used for a presentation, and then begins the process of recording and publishing the lecture with all slide timing and voice narration.

Humble Daisy also killed a number of bugs from the previous version of ProfCast, and version 2.3.0 is a free upgrade to existing owners of the application. The program is $59.95 for first-time buyers, and educational discounts are available. ProfCast can be purchased from the online store.



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Educators and professionals who need to record and podcast lectures often turn to Humble Daisy's ProfCast, a tool for adding enhancements...
 

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Simon Arch

mmm...Garamond Narrow... Haven't seen that old chestnut in a few years.

January 05 2009 at 4:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dave Chmura

None whatsoever. We want you to get a full appreciation for what ProfCast does (and does not) do before you commit! I will be the first one to tell you that ProfCast isn't the perfect tool for every job. It is a great tool for the job it was intended to do though.

January 05 2009 at 3:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dave Chmura

That is certainly one approach. ProfCast also reads urls embedded in your slide's notes to create a clickable link (embedded in the media file that you distribute). So you could use ProfCast to record a presentation and have a link to the video that was embedded in a particular slide available for the user.

Alternatively, you could create your recording using ProfCast, and then edit in the video file using GarageBand or QuickTime after the fact.

Mostly it depends on your intended audience.

January 05 2009 at 3:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Dave Chmura's comment
Julian Prior

Dave, does the trial version have any restrictions (other than the 15-day limit)?

January 05 2009 at 3:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bill Tilstone

Thanks Dave. So if I have a Keynote presentation with embedded video I'd be better exporting to iPod direct from Keynote but if using slides and audio it would be better to use ProfCast? (It is Keynote 4).

January 05 2009 at 2:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jash Sayani

The price is very steep......

January 05 2009 at 2:50 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to Jash Sayani's comment
Bill Tilstone

Steve, can you please tell me what does this do that exporting a Keynote presentation (incorporating narration) does not do?

January 05 2009 at 1:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Bill Tilstone's comment
Dave Chmura

That's a fair question. ProfCast still adds important value to Keynote 4.0 (iWorks '08). ProfCast incorporates the slide titles from your presentation and automatically generates chapter markers. The chapter markers make it easy for listeners to navigate to a particular section of the recording.

If you recorded using Keynote would need to go back manually and add descriptive chapter titles for your slides without ProfCast.

Another important difference between Keynote's audio recording and exporting ability and ProfCast's is that the former produces video with an audio soundtrack while the latter produces an enhanced podcast, which is to say an audio track with integrated still images. The end result of a ProfCast recording is a much smaller file size.

That's not to mention those who are unfortunately stuck with Keynote 2, Keynote 3, or Powerpoint.

Dave Chmura

January 05 2009 at 2:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Julian Prior

Bill - the current combination of the latest versions of Keynote and Quicktime introduced a bug whereby audio is lost when exporting a Keynote slideshow with narration. Until Apple fixes this, Profcast could be a good alternative for those affected by the bug.

January 05 2009 at 2:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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