COULD YOUR CHURCH USE THIS MULTIMEDIA SOFTWARE?
- Web
Evangelism's Tony Whittaker reports on an illuminating freebie ...
John
Allen has found Illuminatus Opus very useful software to make
a standalone multimedia presentation in a fairly small space. He got
version 4.5 free on a magazine coverdisk recently, and liked it so
much he paid real pennies for the latest version. He sees its evangelistic
potential as high:
"It's ideal for creating anything from a simple slideshow of
your holiday pictures to a full-blown corporate presentation or even
an educational quiz game. Opus takes what was already a wonderfully
powerful and versatile package and adds support for more audio and
visual filetypes, enhanced animation features, vector drawing tools
and more besides.
"In common with its predecessors, the program uses the metaphor
of a book to represent a presentation. To the individual pages within
this book you can add background graphics, text, pictures, sound and
video clips, buttons, text input boxes, live Web pages and more besides,
in order to build up slick and sophisticated presentations. Many of
these elements can be interactive, or animated, or can appear or disappear
through a variety of weird and wonderful transitions.
"One of the features new to Opus is support for Microsoft Office
file types, so it's now possible, for instance, to incorporate a Word
document directly into a presentation. MP3 and ASF formats have been
added to an already impressive list of audio file types which can
be assigned to specific pages or actions, and it's also now possible
to specify that some parts of background images can be transparent,
allowing you to create applications with exotically-shaped program
windows.
"Another improvement is that it's also now possible to output
a presentation as a single executable file - in previous versions
such files always had to be accompanied with resource files. Alternatively
you can export presentations for use on the Web.
"To give you a couple of examples of how I've used it:
a) Last year we did a teaching series at church on the last events
of Jesus' life, based on the Gospel of Luke. Instead of offering evangelistic
leaflets, we offered a CD Rom containing a presentation on each of
the instalments of the series; the relevant chapters of Luke in Acrobat
format; an audio version of Luke's Gospel in Real Audio format; a
Flash presentation about the cross, and another about the resurrection;
and a presentation of how to become a Christian, too.
The whole thing was linked together by Illuminatus in an auto-play
format which allowed easy clickable menu access to everything. We
even included Flash plug-ins, the Acrobat reader and the latest Real
Player in case people didn't have them. The take-up was tremendous.
b) For our Under-5s holiday club, I used a little Aiptek pen cam to
take digital pictures of the children each day, then stuck them all
on a CD the night before our final picnic. The parents got 200 pictures
of their children, the Holiday Club theme song on a MIDI file, 60
other assorted nursery rhyme MIDIs, downloadable clip-art pictures
for the children to colour in, the entire New Testament, and our evangelistic
'It's Your Call' website for good measure.
Again, the Illuminatus program provided an easy and attractive interface
for people to launch it all."
- You can find it at http://www.digitalworkshop.co.uk/products/opus/index.shtml
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