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adobe's acquisition of Serious Magic last year put the company in an enviable position: Not only did Adobe make tools that the majority of creative professionals used, but the acquisition of Serious Magic gave Adobe an even stronger foothold in the education market, as Serious Magic's products had become must-have products for communications programs in high schools and institutions of higher education.
The newest version of Visual Communicator, called Adobe Visual Communicator 3, builds on the strengths of the original product-including the use of a powerful green screen software module that makes presentations look like true broadcast newscasts-and takes a few solid steps forward. Sporting extended features and integration into the Flash Media Server, Visual Communicator 3 also allows Adobe to address the corporate training market, in which it has had previous limited success. Building on Flash's interactive capabilities as well as the high-quality Flash Video 8 video compression, Visual Communicator 3 also has another major trick up its sleeve: Serious Magic's Visual Communicator 2 pro version cost almost $800, yet the cost of Adobe's Visual Communicator 3 costs less than $400, even though it combines all the pro features of version 2 and adds several new features.
SHOW TIME
Visual Communicator looks, in some ways, like a standard teleprompter, which is designed for use by one person for both review and recording. Its true power lies, however, in its ability to rapidly create complex newscasts using a series of icons on a vertical timeline. The icons allow for transitions from a live camera shot to pre-recorded content or another live camera, the addition of graphics to the videos-including the names and titles of on-air talent-and the bundling of the recorded output into a single file that can easily be published to video tape, a hard drive, or a network server.
Setup of Visual Communicator 3 was fairly straightforward. Initial setup on a Vista or Windows XP machine does not require external video cameras to be plugged in during installation, a benefit for those who might want to set up Visual Communicator 3 on their laptop before going to a quiet location to record.
At launch, the product provides a new wizard that allows the user to choose from the types of recordings they might...