I have been on the lookout for an inexpensive and easy to use tool for commenting video. I think there would be a number of applications in which such a tool would be useful. For example, preservice teachers might use such a tool to comment/reflect on their own performance in teaching a practice lesson.
I know that this capability exists. For example, the large PT3 video project (InTime) hosted by the University of Northern Iowa allows the viewer to select from among multiple commentaries on the same video. I know how to edit the Quicktime text track to display HTML pages, but this does not really provide a reasonable solution for someone who is not interested in coding.
I thought I located the product I was looking for when I found Microsoft Producer (see my comments on 20.6.03). Producer was intended as a PowerPoint extension. It provides an easy way to connect PowerPoint slides with specific locations within a video and publish the combination for web presentation (or local viewing using a browser). However, Producer operates only within the Windows XP environment and the product generated can only be viewed using IE for Windows. For you Windows types, this is a good solution.
I have just encountered something new. It has limitations, but it is both free and cross platform. Video Paper Builder is a product developed by the Concord Consortium with support from NSF. It is a tool for integrating video, images, and text and produces a product for the web. A screen capture of the display from my experimentation is provided below.
This product has some quirks. You can insert buttons in text to jump to a point in the video and you can set points in the video to display an image, but you cannot directly get the video to trigger the display of a specific text segment (unless I am missing something). What the system does is reveal a strange little symbol in the upper left-hand corner of the video (see the screen image) that when clicked will display the text. If you enjoy exploring experimental products, give this one a try. I think this group is moving in the right direction, but may be one version away from a tool that will be widely adopted.
