I'm certainly not down playing the complexities/challenges of the platform. (not to mention the cost/time savings). My point was that their current offering is inaccessible to many folks to which this solution would be very applicable. Perhaps a provider will implement the system and offer one-time rates or scaled down service offerings, who knows.
I just wanted to get my hands on it for our place...but no matter how much I sing and dance about cost savings and/or increased productivity, CFO will baulk at the price. (we're a small company ~ 93 employees - but we have 3 main offices with 2 satellite offices around the world) As for items like bandwidth requirements, we have virtual circuits to all our offices where in most cases it would be a single stream to the boardroom in each main office...so to implement in-house those particular costs are negligible. We've been using a video-conference over IP solution for a few years now with great results but it's lacking in respect to providing any interaction/presentation features...which is what caught my eye with Breeze. Thanks for the input! Stace -----Original Message----- From: Jeremy Brodie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 12:15 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Anyone looked at MM Breeze? Stacy, It turns out creating a video synching to a Powerpoint is a very complex process as well as expensive. The process of creating one of these projects involves these non-technical issues: 1) Clear video. If you shoot a video in a normal office, shadows occur from the overhead florestant (sp) lighting. This type of lighting can also produce a slight annoying hum picked up by a microphone. Ditto for any AC/heating units. Result: You'll need to book studio time for 500 per 8 hours, not including the people to shoot the video. If you try do this inside of an ordanary seminar in a confrence room, your presented will turn dark because of shadowing. 2) Production team and assistants. These people help create the environment where you look and sound good. These guys are in charge of lighting and staging. Result: $1000 per day. For a 20 minute shoot, think 3 days of shooting. 3) Storyboarding. With this much money for production, one needs to know ahead of time the presentation story, graphical layouts and stage directions. Gestures sholuld be mapped to slide events to add effectivness Result: Although your milage will varry this takes a few days to produce, very for a short 5 minute presentation. Lots of editing happens to make the audio parts audio and the video parts work together with the slide. Issues 4 and 5 talk about technology of the stream itself 4) Streaming. Bandwidth is expensive (for these types of projects), especally if many people view your video. For example, if you are streaming each video using an 80K bitrate, then only 20 need to view the presentation at the same time to view the T-1 line. 5) The actual syncing. The events triggering the calls to the slides either need actionscript (for Flash) or programming embbeded inside of the video using the script channel. The eventlisteners themselves (non flash) require heavy use of Javascript in Netscape and a bit of COM and VB on the IE side, as well as javascript to trigger the events. Result: On different platforms, this can be flakey. i.e.-- event model for Windows Media Player does not wrok for Netscape 7, Event model for Real crashes in IE 6 w/out explaination. With this in mind there are less costly alternatives out there to use this type of technology. This is a short list based upon the things you'll hear in the e-learning space... others on the list probally have other options, products and ideas to bring down the cost further or have less reliance on Microsoft or Real. a) Powerpoint Broadcasting. You can stream your powerpoint slides using Powerpoint broadcasting. This "free" solution requires going the full Microsoft route, including Windows Media Server and Windows Media Player b) Flash Slides with Audio. If you are halfway decent in Flash, you can add audio to your Flash Presentation. You can choose either to stream the audio using the Soresen CODEC. c) Microsoft Presenter. The program is free but the learning curve is pretty steep. Additionally, going this route foces you to encode in Windows Media Version 7-9 -- many people still use the 6.4 player and will not be able to view the presentation. Keep in mind with these (<90K) alternatives, audio is always cheeper than video, since less production is needed. However, even these alternatives are not cheep -- too many people and too much is involved to make this an inexpensive proposition for most-- and I have not even brought together any e-learning compoents or talked about live presentations! Jeremy >Looks awesome...except when I checked the price tag ($90K USD). >Yikes! >Obviously this product is tailored for 500+ employees at the minimum. >There has to be some way for you MM folks to shrink that down to a >smaller offering. I'm getting flashbacks of Spectra pricing here! ;-) > >Stace > > >AVIS IMPORTANT: >------------------------------- >Les informations contenues dans le present document et ses pieces >jointes sont strictement confidentielles et reservees a l'usage de la >(des) personne(s) a qui il est adresse. Si vous n'etes pas le >destinataire, soyez avise que toute divulgation, distribution, copie, >ou autre utilisation de ces informations est strictement prohibee. Si >vous avez recu ce document par erreur, veuillez s'il vous plait >communiquer immediatement avec l'expediteur et detruire ce document >sans en faire de copie sous quelque forme. > >WARNING: >------------------------------- >The information contained in this document and attachments is >confidential and intended only for the person(s) named above. If you >are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any >disclosure, copying, distribution, or any other use of the information >is strictly prohibited. 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