PA trials new slideshow tool at Press Awards

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 March 2007 at 10:29
Tags: British Press Awards, Press Association, Press Gazette, ShowBuilder, slideshows, twitter

Last night, Press Gazette reported the winners of the British Press Awards live on a dedicated blog (on Twitter).

But the most exciting aspects of the project was our first public use of ShowBuilder, a new multimedia slideshow tool being developed by the Press Association and Vexed Digital.

Using the tool, we created audio sideshows to embed in the blog posts announcing the winners of the visual categories and the national newspaper of the year. Each slideshow featured pre-recorded audio commentary by Tony Loynes, Press Gazette’s editor-in-chief and chairman of the BPA judges.

ShowBuilder is designed to allow rapid development of multimedia projects that can include both stills and video clip, along with a an audio track.

The tool is a bit like the Soundslides application that many newsrooms are by now familiar with — except that it is a network application. It is installed on a server, meaning that the application is accessible to any reporter or photographer with a laptop, internet access and a web browser. This also means that the tool can be collaborative — multimedia editors back in a newsroom can, for example, work on a slideshow started by a photographer uploading stills and video in the field.

The Flash movies the software creates are also stored on the server, eliminating the need for large multimedia files to be sent between servers. A snippit of HTML allows the Flash file to be embedded in any other web page, such as our blog.

Once testing is completed, PA will roll out ShowBuilder to its own photographers, and eventually license it to customers, such as regional newspapers.

PA’s Robert Freeman, who burned the post-midnight oil to produce the slideshows, explains more on his excellent blog, MediaBizTech.