Podcast Producer 2. Office broadcasting.

Podcast Producer 2 is a complete, end-to-end solution for encoding, publishing, and distributing high-quality podcasts — ideal for employee training, university lectures, presentations, and more. New features in Podcast Producer 2 offer more options for capturing, creating, and publishing podcasts, making it even easier to share critical content around your organization.

What is Podcast Producer 2?

Podcasts are ideal for distributing university lectures, training a sales force, delivering product demos, or simply keeping employees, students, and customers up to date. Podcast Producer 2 simplifies the process of capturing, editing, and publishing them, letting your organization produce more podcasts with less work while maintaining a high degree of standardization among them. It’s a workflow-based solution that automates the details, such as encoding content into specific file formats or adding standard title frames and opening videos. So the podcasts from your group will always have a consistent look and feel, and you’ll never have to worry about missing an important step.

Easy setup.

Setting up Podcast Producer 2 is now easier than ever with a new setup assistant in Server Admin. It provides an express mode that can configure Podcast Producer and all its related services in a matter of minutes, whether you’re setting up a single Podcast Producer server or a cluster of servers.

Start and stop.

A podcast starts with the Podcast Capture application in Mac OS X. This innovative tool makes it easy for users to capture high-quality audio and video from local and remote cameras, record screen captures, and upload existing content into Podcast Producer 2 for encoding and distribution. Podcast Capture records audio and video from a wide range of devices, including digital video cameras connected via FireWire, USB microphones, and iSight cameras.

Record at will.

Recording a podcast is a snap. Simply open Podcast Capture, log in, and select the type of podcast you would like to record — then click Start. When finished recording, click Stop. Give your podcast a title, add a description, and pick the appropriate workflow. It’s that simple.

Snow Leopard Server adds new video capture features. The new dual-source video capture enables you to create picture-in-picture podcasts. For instance, one video source can record a presenter and the other source can record a slideshow. Podcast Producer 2 can even detect inactivity in one of the video sources and automatically switch video sources so that the active source is displayed in the larger frame. Your video can use one of several Apple-designed templates, or you can design your own layout using Quartz Composer.

To convert a slideshow or other document into a video, you can use the new “documents to movie capture” mode. It renders any Quick Look-compatible file into a movie with transitions between images or pages.

And the new web podcast capture allows you to remotely capture and upload audio and video movies to a Podcast Producer server for encoding and publishing using any modern web browser on your Mac, PC, or iPhone.

It’s automatic.

Once recording is completed, the file is automatically uploaded to Podcast Producer 2 for processing. Podcast Producer 2 leverages the power of QuickTime X to encode content into standard formats such as H.264 and MPEG-4.

Easy-to-create
workflows.

Podcast Producer 2 includes the new Podcast Composer, an easy-to-use application that lets you create your own workflows to automate the completion and publishing of podcasts. It offers an intuitive interface that groups the process of building a workflow into seven stages and guides you through the steps required to create a workflow. You specify everything from import to notification, including details about which titles, transitions, and effects to use; what output format is used; where the podcast is published; and more.

Podcast Producer workflow: import stage dialogue window

Publish it.

Once the podcast is complete, Podcast Producer 2 makes it easy and automatic to publish it to the right location — whether to a blog, to iTunes or iTunes U, to multimedia-enabled cell phones using QuickTime Podcast storage Streaming Server, or to the new Podcast Library. Podcast Library provides long-term storage and organization for submitted and generated media files. Podcasts are delivered using automatically generated RSS feeds or with Atom feeds, which allows each feed to contain multiple versions or formats of the podcast for different devices.