Easy Mac Solution To Making Your Videos "Clickable" - Sort of

Wow this blog posting is really turning out to be a bear!

A recent episode of the "Macbreak Studio" podcast made my day by pointing out yet another very useful thing my Mac can do for me....make my videos interactive.....SORT OF. Unfortunately I got so excited about the potential of this super easy solution that I didn't test it out before first blogging about it here about an hour ago....oooops, big mistake on my part, worse yet I repeated that mistake!

Ok, here's the straight dope: this podcast presents a very cool technique but it failed to mention its limitations and gave what I believe to be a misleading impression.

What you can do is overlay your video with "clickable" text or graphic objects. Here's the big limitation....unless you animate those objects they naturally will appear throughout the entire video and not move. That turns out to be not so practical.

Let's say you had in your video podcast some footage of a digital camera and you wanted to provide an interactive link so that your video podcast audience could click on it while watching and be taken to a Web site with more detailed information or even an opportunity to purchase that same camera. Well, you wouldn't want that clickable area to appear in your video until the camera is shown right? You wouldn't want your "Click Here For More Information" link appearing in your opening title sequence for instance.

Animating an object over a video background within Keynote is not a minor task...my most recent experiments indicate that it probably is very possible to do, but not easy.

Here's the "MacBreak Studio" episode that got me all excited....please experiment on your own and let me know if I have overlooked anything but for right now I have to put this in the "interesting but not practical column."

http://www.pixelcorps.tv/mbks_026