I’m wrapping up the publishing status UIs this week. After a lot of discussions over email with users, I’m going with a “Privacy” rather than “Publishing” metaphor.
In the past, it made sense to think of creating work online in terms of print publishing. Your story is a “draft” until you click a button and foist your story onto the web. But today, it’s more a matter of setting your work’s visibility to “public” or “password-protected”, etc … rather than a one-time publishing event. This metaphor matches the direction of most multimedia content platforms.
As of today, there are four options for the privacy of your show.
Public, private, password-protected, and a private link. As before, the privateonly-you-can-see-it option is the default.
Here’s the new display available on the show list.
I’m not sure if this is the best location to post this question, but I can’t locate anywhere better to post it to.
I’m curious if there is a SoundSlide FAQ that lets potential new SoundSlide users, like myself, learn what SoundSlide can do, and why it is useful to use it?
I have PowerPoint 2019 and have also used WPS Presentation (free version), which both have export to video capabilities and I’m wondering what capabilities SoundSlide offers beyond what is already possible with the two previously mentioned software applications?
I also have a specific question. Which is, can SoundSlide export video so as to not lose quality and yet have much smaller file size than what is capable by using something like PowerPoint 2019?
There’s no FAQ at the present. It’s on the TODO list for our launch later this month. The previous desktop-based Soundslides application has been around since 2006, and was utilized by photographers, audio storytellers, podcasts, and other communications professionals.
Soundslides combines images sequentially with an audio track, with an emphasis on timing an image slide with a particular section of audio (as opposed to the audio merely playing in the background). The app has been used in the past by entities from journalism (BBC, NYTimes, WashPost) to governmental orgs (WHO, World Bank) to countless individuals. It also found a place as a platform for lectures and other long-form presentations.
I’m not up-to-date on the PowerPoint and similar offerings, but I do understand that these can export to video now with a separate audio track for each slide. Soundslides has a single audio track that you time images against.
Soundslides’s main output is not a video file, but rather a web presentation (HTML5/Javascript). This presentation (example) only contains the image files, audio file, and a bit of timing data. For the example show, this is roughly ~3mb (depending on your connection) and streams immediately on most devices including mobile. The Soundslides player is adaptive for each device, so on an iPhone for instance, you would see a much smaller image file size than if you were viewing on a 30in monitor.
Hosting is provided by Soundslides, so there’s nothing to upload to your web server or upload to YouTube or Vimeo. Soundslides hosts the files and you can link to the presentation or embed it in your site.
As a point of comparison, the exported video file for the (same project) is 40mb. (Soundslides also exports video if that’s what you needed, but the output video would be similar in file size to any other video-based applications).
