Make Your Own TV Shows with Serious Magic – Personal Broadcaster

 by Mark Shapiro

So you want to create your own professional looking TV broadcast complete with blue-screen backgrounds, superimposed graphics, flashy transitions and baseball supers?  How would you like to be able to create a real time television show that can be aired live over a cable, broadcast or CCTV network, streamed out over the Internet, or even recorded to tape or DVD for mass distribution?

 You don’t need a crew, you don’t need a TV studio – all you need is the Serious Magic Visual Communicator program and a video camera. This inexpensive program (around $100) installs on your Windows computer and enables you to create amazingly professional video productions starring yourself, a member of your family, or a business spokesperson.

 You can use an inexpensive web cam, a professional video camera or even your analog or DV camcorder to capture the shots. This is an amazing software product, developed by the people who originally created the $100 Snappy Video Capture Device and the $100,000 professional broadcast Play video production studio.

 It enables someone with little or no experience to easily create an entire live show – from only a few seconds in length up to a half hour or more.  The concept is that Serious Magic converts your computer into a video teleprompter with a rolling script that you or your spokesperson then reads. The attached video camera feeds into the computer and the Serious Magic software than combines the live video with your pre-recorded video and graphic elements. The video is then exported in real time – to a videotape recorder, to a broadcast system, or out over the Internet.

 To make it easier to use, the rolling teleprompter screen also includes various cues and intros so that the reader can see upcoming special effects and inserted elements before they actually appear on the computer screen.

 Before the production starts, you write and input the script, select and insert your various video, graphic and still image elements, add titles and captions, as well as create your shows opening and closing segments. You can input video files like ASF, WMV, AVI and MPEG, graphic files like BMP, JPG, gif and PNG, and audio files WAV,  MP3 and WMA.

 You can use the preview function to rehearse the script over and over again, and make sure all the transitions and inserted elements work as planned. If not, you can easily go back and fine-tune them before the final camera roll.

 The software includes a variety of different design elements as well as musical tags you can use. Once you have selected your basic elements, you can then add cool transitions between the video of the spokesperson reading the on-screen teleprompter and rolled in elements. These can include pre-recorded video segments, still images and graphics, as well as special titles. You can also use the “green screen” effect behind the speaker to change the background. Instead of being in the office computer room, the speaker can appear to be in outer space, in the jungle, anywhere. All you need is the appropriate background image and the Serious Magic program can make it seem like you are there on location.  Pretty darn cool.

 The video looks amazingly good for such an inexpensive product. I found that it was quite intuitive to set up the program and to actually create my own broadcasts. Serious Magic allows you to start simply by plugging in your images and information into pre-created video formats and shows. However, once you get past that the first tier of pre-created templates, the power of this solution is truly demonstrated.

 I found that the only difficult part of setting up and using Visual Communicator is figuring out where to put the camera to that it doesn’t look like the speaker is reading from the monitor screen. It took me some time tweaking my monitor angle, camcorder and tripod to make it look realistic. 

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 Visual Communicator is a great program for businesses and corporate communication departments looking for an inexpensive and easy to use method of creating video programs for in-house and marketing needs. It may not be as flashy or as slick as hiring a professional video production company to handle your spots, but it is heck of a lot cheaper and a lot quicker.

 Serious Magic Visual Communicator is available in three versions – the basic version for $99.95 is just the software. For $149.95, you get the Visual Communicator Plus that includes a green screen backdrop that makes it easy to add your backgrounds and a special clip-on microphone that improves audio quality while reducing ambient background noise. This is the version beginners should opt for.

 Visual Communicator Pro has been recently introduced. For $349, it is targeted to communication professionals. The new version provides a higher resolution video image, as well as including additional graphic style templates, graphics, music tracks, new video effects and transitions. Of special interest to corporate communication departments is the new ability to import Power Point presentations and files. They have bundled in Pinnacle Expression DVD that enables you to burn your final productions to DVD for distribution.

 Visual Communicator is a great program for creating “talking head” types of programs. It is easy to set-up use, outputs good-looking video with flashy effects and transitions, and enables almost anyone to look like a star on their program.

 Click here for more info and to buy Visual Communicator Plus from Amazon