ProfCast: Record and Publish Lectures as Podcasts

Posted by Scott Myles on 01/26/08 in Audio, Education, Podcasting

As businesses and schools move more and more into the digital age, presentations and lectures are more commonly being recorded and stored electronically for future use.

I personally attend many presentations at work where someone is at the back of the room with a video camera running to capture the presenter, his/her presentation on the overhead and the delivery that goes with it.

While this adds immense value for reuse of the presentation, the quality is often poor, and in many cases, the presentation itself is illegible. ProfCast, from Humble Daisy, is a great application for capturing live presentation content and audio in a format that can be easily published and distributed via a number of open channels.
ProfCast is able to record either PowerPoint or Keynote presentations in-time with the presenters audio.

With each new recording, a project document is created storing the raw material for future editing. Recordings can be shared by publishing as a Quicktime (.mov) movie or exporting to GarageBand or iWeb. The GarageBand export supports either enhanced .m4a audio or .m4b audio book formats. Through the use of ID3 Tags, it’s possible to include additional descriptive metadata information which is particularly useful when publishing content to iTunes U.

ProfCast Screenshot

Podcasts are managed within a central repository called The Podcast Manager. Recordings are managed as a podcast series with associated episodes which can be edited and published. Additionally, screenshots, embedded links and other media not created by ProfCast can be included in the published podcast. The Podcast Manager will generate and publish well formed RSS feed files as well as publish the recording to an FTP, .Mac WebDav or local location.

With the mid-January update, Profcast 2.2 is now fully compatible with 10.5 Leopard as well as iLife 08 and iWork 08. ProfCast, distributed as shareware, is available for a 15 day free trial evaluation after which registration costs $59.95. Education pricing is available with volume discounts. If you’re the poor guy standing at the back of the room working the camcorder, why not give ProfCast a try and recommend it to your next set of presenters?

It will make your life a lot easier. Future viewers will thank you.

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1 Comment(s)

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Rob said on

January 26th, 2008 at 9:05 am

Maybe I’m missing something, but why would one need this since Keynote in ‘08 lets you record a slideshow and export as a MOV. You could just as easily dump that in GarageBand and create a podcast with it.

Looking at the forums for it as well as I noticed that it’s missing the ONE thing that I would have wanted that I feel is missing in iWork. That is the ability to incorporate video of the presenter themselves in a MacWorld Keynote kind of way. iChat can sort of do this, but it doesn’t seem possible without being in an iChat session.