Intercast Television
By Paul Safr
Most Web video displays at the size of a book of stamps, at best, and lacks high-quality video and audio effects like 3D screen transitions and multiple audio levels. Scala's InfoChannel Designer 1.1 tries to fix these limitations and bring the impact of TV to the Web.
Designer is a tool for authoring and delivering full-screen multimedia presentations called "scripts." Its interface resembles Microsoft PowerPoint in that it uses the "slide show" metaphor. What makes these scripts more interesting is that the slides can be video files (such as AVI or MPEG) and can also include audio. Furthermore, you can play an unlimited number of sound files (WAV and MIDI) within a presentation. The interface has been optimized to be more intuitive and provide more features than PowerPoint. For example, the slides representing your content are scaled-down versions of the actual screens and use a high-quality scaling routine to preserve the screens' details, which helps you visualize the flow of your presentation. File requesters show representations of any images in a folder and have a button that lets you preview audio or video files before loading them. The interface is also responsive; slides maintain their appearance even as you move them around while you edit the sequence of your presentation.
You generate the slides, which are also called screens or backgrounds, to present your narrative, and you can add effects or transitions as you move from slide to slide.
