Adobe Voice for iPad creates audio, video presentations quickly and easily
Adobe has released a nice story-telling app called Adobe Voice for iPad. It's available for free from the App Store, but a Creative Cloud account is required to use it.
Adobe Voice lets you easily create animated videos for personal use or business presentations. You can include your own photos and graphics, and the app can easily create cinema-quality effects like animations and transitions. When you are done, your presentation can be emailed, sent to social media services like Twitter or Facebook, or you can get a link so it can be viewed on any device.
The app contains more than 25,000 icons, professionally-animated themes and licensed music to fit almost any mood. Adobe places credit and attributions page at the end of each presentation, so you needn't worry usage rights.
I was able to get an advance look at Adobe Voice, and generally I came across very impressed. A tutorial that leads you through your initial project, though most actions are obvious. You can record narration for each page, and if you don't like it it is easy to re-record. By answering questions before you begin, Adobe Voices can make some suggestions about how to proceed, but you can be on your own if you like.
Adobe Voice makes nice-looking video presentations, and that's a good thing. an Adobe spokesman noted that about 19% of web traffic is generated by YouTube, and that video was extremely important in business and personal consumption.
It's clear from using Adobe Voice that a lot of thought has gone into producing this app. I can't think of a way to make creating a professional grade presentation could be any easier. Every element can be changed after the fact. Images, icons, animations, music, and narrations.
Who will use this app? Students, families, small businesses, photographers, and people who have a story they want to share and didn't previously have a way to illustrate and share that story.
A couple caveats. When I created a presentation and sent a link to a friend, the video quality was far from perfect. I had used some high quality photos, and the video really did not reflect their quality. Also, I find it a bit strange that the app works only in portrait orientation on the iPad. Most video is longer in width than height, so why doesn't the app configure itself for the best view?
I asked Adobe about storage limits. There are no limits at this time, so create as much as you want. Videos are stored on Adobe servers and can't be stored locally yet. Everything is in the cloud, and any server issues could send your presentations to the land of lost content. Adobe is using industry standards for video. H.264 HD video and HTML5 so people can view Adobe Voice videos on any device.
Adobe Voice is an elegant and clever app. It is likely designed to push more people to the Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions the company covets, and I'm sure it will. It's a very nice benefit of Creative Cloud membership at a very nice price of free.
Adobe Voice needs an iPad 2 or later, and iOS 7.
