Zentation: Is it Zensational?
Do you know about Zentation? Zentation provides you an easy way to show your slides in sync with your video. As you know, just making slides of your presentation available for someone who missed your talk is not ideal (in fact it's usually a bad idea). But if there was an easy way (without having to buy software) to show a video of your presentation and the slides in sync with your video then that would be pretty cool. Zentation does that. Zentation is not perfect, and for my kind of presentations it does not really work so well, but for people who have a relatively few number of slides in their talk, it seems to work pretty well.
Leave it to Guy
As always the presentation is only as good as the content and the presenter, regardless of how well the technology works (or doesn't), so I could not find too many great presentations on the site (but I didn't look too hard either, so let us know if there are some killer preso uploaded there). But leave it to our buddy Guy Kawasaki to put up a presentation that worked very well on Zentation. Even if you have seen Guy speak on the Art of the Start before, check this out. Again this is not ideal perhaps, but it's much better than just slides. Of course, if your slides and you are both clearly visible in the video, then Zentation would not be necessary. (I'm still looking for an easy way to pull off the effect of your local TV weather caster, where the presenter and large screen behind him are easily viewable).
(Above) Guy Kawasaki at the 2007 Event Marketer Conference. You can watch it just as it appears above — which I like since the presenter and slides are right next to each other — or click on "full screen" to see a much larger slide (and slightly larger video screen).
Robin Good wrote an excellent, detailed review of Zentation back in April.
Well, I guess the Theater Mode in iChat will be able to do some stuff like that… if you can wait for Leopard ;-)
Posted by: Guillaume Gete | July 01, 2007 at 07:07 PM
>Well, I guess the Theater Mode in iChat will be able to do some stuff like >that… if you can wait for Leopard ;-)
Yes, Grasshopper, you are wise.... Mac users will love what waits for them this fall... -g
Posted by: Garr Reynolds | July 01, 2007 at 10:12 PM
VideoCue from Varsoware is a nice piece of software already available on the mac that allow to record both the presenter and his slides (and is also a teleprompter). The slides have to be imported in the timeline so it is not possible to use directly a Keynote or powerpoint slide show .. but recording a slide show with the presenter video is really easy.
Posted by: Philippe Joannis | July 02, 2007 at 12:26 AM
Oh a new toy for me to play with!!
Posted by: Scott McArthur | July 02, 2007 at 08:57 AM
Can you fix the apostrophes in this post? This is what I see in Safari on my Mac:
it’s
didn’t
Posted by: Mark | July 03, 2007 at 02:16 AM
Thanks!
Posted by: Mark | July 03, 2007 at 04:06 AM
Zentation is your work, or did you work on the idea? If you did congratulations. It is a baby now, but when it will grow big it will have the power to amaze the world. It's a really good idea implemented!
Posted by: Daniel Condurachi | July 07, 2007 at 06:48 AM
Do you know where one can download a video of this presentation? I would like to look at it offline...
Posted by: Kutti | July 08, 2007 at 06:50 PM
I invite you to try http://www.vcasmo.com, it provides much better features than zentation
Posted by: luar | August 24, 2007 at 02:17 AM