Web Presentation Service Brings Musical Soundtracks To Your Multimedia Presentations: FlipTrack Video Intro
Web presentation services are growing in number, and it is becoming easier than ever to put together good looking multimedia presentations with very little in the way of technical skills. This makes for an excellent way of delivering your presentations over the web and at a distance, and very often takes you beyond the limitations of PowerPoint at the same time.
While a picture can speak a thousand words, though, the addition of music can make an emotional impact that might be lacking in images alone. A new service, aimed primarily at those wishing to soundtrack their photo collections, offers an easy way of editing your slides together, and adding perfectly timed soundtracks guaranteed to be totally in sync with your images.
Gone are the days of only being able to roughly time your images and soundtrack - this simple precision tool allows you to perfectly match moments in your slide-show to specific points in the music. Using a simple interface, you can drag and drop your images to be perfectly matched up to dramatic points in your soundtrack.
Gone also are worries about clearing copyright for the music you use. While there are other services that allow you to use your own music, they very often add a disclaimer in the small print letting you know that should you use copyrighted music you - and you alone - will be responsible for the ensuing law suit.
This new service supplies a music library of hundreds of songs for you to select from, in which all of the tracks have been cleared for copyright. You can easily browse through the collection online, or from your desktop, and select the music most suitable to your presentation.
This ability to quickly, easily add music to your presentations, edit and add effects to them, and publish them online makes for a valuable addition to your arsenal of web presentation tools, and allows you to embed the resulting multimedia presentations directly into your blog or website.
In this short introductory video, the new service Fliptrack shows how you can do all of this and more.
Introducing Fliptrack
Fliptrack is both an online destination and a downloadable application (for Windows only at the time of writing) for preparing your multimedia presentations. Using these two integrated services together, it is possible to access a vast collection of copyright-cleared music and precisely sync it up to your images, which can in turn be placed into templates and have various video effects and transitions applied to them.
In a nutshell Fliptrack provides a very fast solution for anyone looking to create online presentations or photo slide-shows with a musical soundtrack chosen from a royalty-free, well stocked music library. It is at once a simple time-line editor, music library and video sharing service, and this is its greatest strength - combining services available elsewhere into a smooth and streamlined work-flow.
In the following chapter-tagged video, you will see how easy it is to:
Add images to a simple timeline and drag them around to sync up with the music you've selected
Add special effects and transitions to your images
Change the in and out points of your slides, so that you can have both rapid fire edits and lingering shots
Preview the video mash-up you have made by combining sound, images and effects
Save, upload and share your project via the < a href="http://www.fliptrack.com">Fliptrack website
Allow people to visit your presentation via a URL, or embed it directly into their web page or blog
Fliptrack and its competitors
Fliptrack manages to differentiate its service from other multimedia presentation tools by providing a custom built music library that you can use to score your slide-shows and presentations without worrying about whether you are going to be sued by the recording industry for doing so.
Certainly, there are other services that will allow you to remix images, music and video using a time-line like Fliptrack's. Video remixing services JumpCut and EyeSpot spring immediately to mind at services that allow you to mash up these elements from an online interface. While arguably they are slightly more complex tools, and thus a little more difficult to get to grips with, they are also more fully featured.
However, what services like JumpCut and EyeSpot don't offer is an extensive music library. Again, there are some great resources online for accessing royalty free music - see for example my recent review of the excellent AudioFormula service that does just that.
Nevertheless, with these services you are still going to need to set down to mixing your audio in an audio-editing program, and then transferring it across to a presentation, which brings you back to the problem of syncing it up to your audio. At this stage, you could bring in an application like Soundslides to sync your audio to your images, with the benefit of also being able to add narration, but to arrive here you have already used at least one more tool in what is starting to look like a less than streamlined work-flow.
Fliptrack stands out by combining these previously scattered services into a single, free to access tool that makes the process of scoring slide-shows a non-technical, easy-to-master activity on par with putting together a simple PowerPoint presentation. Using one free service you can choose your music from an extensive music library, add your images, time them precisely to the music and throw in some effects to spice things up, and then share the results online. This makes for a very streamlined work-flow that will allow you to share your musically enhanced visual presentations without the hassle of using multiple applications.
Room for improvement
What I would like to see in future updates of the service is the ability to do this editing online. While downloading an application is not a terrible set back to the process of scoring a presentation, increasingly users have come to expect to be able to do this sort of thing from within the browser. Jumpcut and Eyespot are already doing this with far more complex applications, and I would argue that Fliptrack could broaden their appeal a lot further if they integrated their applications functionality into a web application.
This would also mean that Mac and Linux users could make use of the service, which at present isn't possible due to a Windows only application, so that's another reason to move into Web 2.0 territory that would potentially broaden their user base. Compatibility aside, it has been proven again and again that people are put off if a service asks them to download an application to make use of it.
In the world of video for instance, YouTube trumps Revver perhaps for this very reason. YouTube needs no download to contribute videos, Revver requires the use of an upload client. Compare their site visitors and see what I mean. In the age of Ajax, Ruby on Rails and Flash 9 there is no need to use the dirty word "download".
It would also be nice to be able to add audio narration to the soundtracks, but this is perhaps outside of Fliptrack's current remit. Admittedly, it sets itself up as an easy, effective way to add soundtracks to (largely photo-based) slide-shows, and isn't directly pitched at the presentation market, but this would be a very welcome feature that could still compliment the use of popular lyric-based music in the Fliptrack library. This is more a desirable extra than a flaw in the Fliptrack system, which does effectively what it sets out - adds royalty-free soundtracks and allows you to precisely edit and enhance your photos and slides in sync with them.
In conclusion
The addition of an easy to use, diverse range of music to the online presentation and video sharing formulas makes Fliptrack a unique service that will prove itself useful to those looking to add an extra dimension to their multimedia presentations. While it won't allow you to create presentations with voice narration, it does present a compelling alternative to popular services like SlideShare, which makes presentations easy to share, but totally silent affairs.
While the service has been used primarily to soundtrack people's photo collections, Fliptrack presents an excellent opportunity to make online presentations a more lively, emotionally engaging affair with a minimum of effort during the design process. As such, it makes for a great addition to the arsenal of tools geared up to making online presentations powerful and arresting, rather than pale imitations of their real-life counterparts.
Additional resources
Visit the Fliptrack website and check out the service for yourself
