Review of iMediaCONVERT (PowerPoint to Flash)

Last summer I wrote about my experience with a now defunct product called Qarbon ViewletPresenter that converted a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation into a Flash file for easy and fast viewing on the web.  While I finally got that product to work, it did have a number of glitches.  In the comments section of that post you’ll see that the manufacturer of a product called iMediaCONVERT shed some light on the lineage of both products.

I finally had a chance to try out iMediaCONVERT, and I’m pleased to say they have indeed tweaked the product to the point that I can say give it a try!  In fact, in my limited testing I discovered that it supports rudimentary animation, where Macromedia Breeze, a much pricier product, does not, and the end result is pretty much the same thing.  Not that animation is terribly important, but I thought I’d mention it since this product is so much cheaper.

When you install CONVERT, you’ll end up with an additional feature inside of PowerPoint.  When you’ve completed your PPT, choose the CONVERT button and it’ll ask you where you want to save the new output, which consists of a separate flash file for each slide, along with some supporting files.  You can tweak the colors of the final output, and some of the timing.  You can also perform all these steps by just firing up CONVERT outside of PPT, but then you have to browse to the location of the file you want to convert.

The interface is a little sparse, but the product did what it was supposed to so I’m willing to overlook that.

So I tried this out on the very same file that choked the ViewletPresenter last summer, and it went off without a hitch.  The end result plays just fine in IE, Firefox and Mozilla.  Wanna see?

iMediaCONVERT: Integrating InfoLit…
Macromedia Breeze:  Integrating InfoLit… (for comparison’s sake)
Last year’s ViewletPresenter file: Integrating InfoLit… (only works in IE and I had to choose a different template to get it to work)

Are you sick of hearing my voice yet?  😉

I know Breeze does lots of other things besides converting PPT, but so far that’s all we’re using it for on our campus, so if you’re only looking for a tool to perform that function, iMediaCONVERT will probably do the trick nicely for you.