Additional improvements for ease of use come in the form of a resizable user interface. This allows you to set up things the way you want, which is much more in keeping with the way Adobe creates most of their professional applications. Plus, in order to move the laptop farther away from the talent (or for talent who have weak eyesight), you can now make the teleprompter fullscreen, which is very expedient.
However, one Ease of Use feature that’s not present is the ability to separately highlight each word in the teleprompter, as opposed to using a scrolling red highlight bar which essentially highlights entire sentences at a time. For inexperienced talent, the more karaoke-like approach of highlighting each word would let them focus on one word at a time, rather than an entire sentence or section of a sentence. Obviously, such a feature would need to be heavily customizable to create a natural reading rhythm.
Depth of Options
The big improvements in VC in terms of depth of options come in the form of title animation, sizing of still graphics, and multi-camera shots.
Users of previous versions of VC will recall that you couldn’t animate the backgrounds on lower-third graphics or title cards. This problem has been removed, so you can now include much more professional motion-graphic background titles that we’re used to seeing on networks like E!, CNN, and ESPN. (This doesn’t mean that it’s going to have nearly the motion graphics ability of something like After Effects, or even Premiere Pro, but it is nice to be able to use some of these moving graphic elements within VC.)
In a similar vein, previous versions of VC limited what you could do to imported still photos that you used, forcing you to re-open graphics in Photoshop if you wanted to crop or resize them. You can now crop and resize the graphics inside of VC3, which is very helpful in keeping this program more autonomous and removing the requirement of having Photoshop or Photoshop Elements on the same laptop that Visual Communicator 3 is on.
Of course, the biggest improvement in the new version is the ability to have three camera inputs, so as to make a small, multi-camera setup. The idea is that you could record interview situations with one camera on your host, one camera on your interview subject, and a third camera on another interviewee or a co-host. (Political debates could be another use, where the host is the mediator.)
While this is a very cool concept, it’s a little misleading. You see, VC3 will only allow you to plug in one USB camera per USB card (which, in most laptops, all the USB ports go into a single internal card) and one firewire camera per card. As such, if you want to have three cameras, your laptop must have a hardwired firewire card inside and you’ll have to get a slide-in firewire card. This combined with a USB camera will allow you to use all three. Fortunately, unless you have a co-host or you’re doing a political debate, most people won’t use three cameras, since two cameras for an interviewer and interviewee situation is common. As such, this isn’t that big a problem for many practical applications. (Especially since the laptop controlling everything is going to be near the interviewer, as it has the teleprompter on it, which precludes an establishing , medium-long shot from a third camera.) Just make sure your USB camera and firewire camera have close enough recording quality to cut well together. Otherwise, you’ll have to get the additional firewire card so you can cut together two identical firewire cameras.
