Time for some Serious Magic!

About two years ago, I wanted to test some video on our corporate intranet. I did some research and found a small software company called Serious Magic. My thinking was that people were trending toward watching video, rather than reading for their information (this was before YouTube got really big). And I'm a firm believer in providing information in the format your audience wants.

I wanted a cheap video production solution that wouldn't require professional skills to produce.

Serious Magic offered a very low cost product that allowed you to create professional looking videos for the web.

Using a teleprompter script (displayed on your laptop) in combination with a laptop (or handheld) video camera, Serious Magic allowed you to easily create professional looking video in streaming flash format (viewable by all browsers). Their product included a "green screen" backdrop to allow you to include fake "sets", like a newsroom or a mountain top. Basic editing features allowed to to drag and drop images, sound files, captions and video into the final production.

It was brilliant.....and cheap.

Today when I went to check out the latest on www.seriousmagic.com, I was disappointed. This little gem of a company had been swallowed up by Adobe.

Now I'm a fan of Adobe products, so I was interested in how Serious Magic would benefit from the deep marketing pockets of it's new owner. You might expect an updated video demo presentation, produced with the product itself, complete with high production values and slick video effects to show off every single feature - a video demo so compelling that you couldn't wait to drop some cash to try it out.

And you'd be dead wrong.

Instead, I was shown a formatted product page with a photo of the software box and a written list of features and benefits (yawn). Adobe might as well be selling it on a Yahoo store. Gone is the terrific video demo done by the founder, using the actual Serious Magic product. Gone is the irreverent, enthusiastic attitude.

Here's a demo of how an upscale version of this product used to be sold.




As a consumer, which works better for you?