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Adobe today announced Adobe Voice, a new iPad app that allows users to make simple animated video "stories" that incorporate voice, photos, icons, music, animated themes, and more. Designed for people that have little to no filmmaking experience, Adobe Voice imagines itself as a useful presentation creation tool for everyone from small business owners to students.

adobevoice.jpg
Designed to help people make an impact online and across social networks -- without requiring any filming or editing -- Adobe Voice is ideal for creative professionals prototyping a project, nonprofits championing a cause, small business owners connecting with customers or students looking to create an interactive and engaging school report.
Adobe Voice can be used to create videos for a wide array of topics, though they are more akin to animated slideshows than traditional videos. The app has a gallery that includes several pre-made videos available through an "Explore" feature, showing the myriad ways the videos can be used: delivering a homework assignment, telling a story, showing off a product, and describing a charity organization are all given as examples.

Adobe aims to assist in the video creation process from idea to completed video with Adobe Voice. The app opens with a set of general story templates that can be used to create a video, including "Explain Something," "Teach a Lesson," "Share an Invitation," and "Promote an Idea," among others. The app also includes ideas for inspiration, suggesting title topics from categories ranging from personal to business to instructional.

Once a template is chosen, the app walks a user through the process of creating a video using simple tap gestures to insert audio and images to a series of slides. Each slide begins with a recording of the user's own voice, which is then set to music.

Icons, text, and images are then added to each slide, from Adobe's own cache of licensed content. Users can search for a photo or icon to represent what they're aiming to convey, which can be added to a video in a few simple steps. By combining several image and text slides with user-created voiceovers, the video is generated bit-by-bit and the entire creation process can take as little as just a few minutes.

Video stories can be customized with a variety of different animated themes (there are more than 30), several different layouts, and mood-appropriate music choices. They're also sharable through a number of different social media outlets including Facebook and Twitter, as well as Adobe's Creative Cloud platform.

Article Link: Adobe Debuts 'Adobe Voice' Video Storytelling App for iPad
 
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snprintf

macrumors member
Apr 20, 2014
69
0
Glad to see Adobe still innovates. They dropped the ball on Flash and, to a lesser extent, Photoshop, but they're still one of my favorite companies.
 

nick42983

macrumors 6502a
May 18, 2009
549
424
Warsaw, Poland
Isn't the point of telling "your story" to use your own photos, videos, etc.? This isn't mentioned. I'm a pretty good story teller and stories have always been fun for me, I don't need Adobe to make them "fun again". This would be useful if I could use my own media, not licensed, stock images. Do I get to keep and use "my story" or does the content I create become Adobe's? Nothing is free, there's always a catch.
 

macs4nw

macrumors 601
I've admittedly never been a big fan of Adobe, but with a likely explosion of themes, layouts, and templates, as well as possible use of one's own content somewhere down the line, I believe this 'innocuous' little App has great potential to catch on in a big way in the future. I can see so many uses for this that my head is spinning.
 

Sabenth

macrumors 6502a
Jan 24, 2003
887
3
UK
Interesting app needs access to my music library for me to really make use of it but its an interesting and good start video would be handy too but hey its only the beginning i guess
 

jayducharme

macrumors 601
Jun 22, 2006
4,517
5,935
The thick of it
Isn't the point of telling "your story" to use your own photos, videos, etc.? This would be useful if I could use my own media, not licensed, stock images.

Absolutely agree. It's interesting that making storytelling "fun" in Adobe's opinion means using only their content (except for snippets of your voice). This seems like nothing more than glorified clip-art in a PowerPoint, with recorded vocals.
 

PastFuture

macrumors newbie
Jan 16, 2013
23
11
Germany
Hmmm… I see nothing here that a person crafting a professional presentation in Keynote couldn't and/or wouldn't already do – except for the instant access to a huge library of searchable images and icons.
 

2457282

Suspended
Dec 6, 2012
3,327
3,015
I gave up on Adobe a long time ago. Their software is always buggy and has been a huge opportunity for viruses and other bad things to get on computers. I hope that they find a way to build better products, but for now, for me, when I hear Adobe, I start running.
 

macduke

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
13,101
19,603
Glad to see "Hammersmith" finally launch. Adobe came to my work last year to talk about this software with our journalism students and let us try out the beta. I thought that was a pretty neat thing for them to do!
 

MyopicPaideia

macrumors 68020
Mar 19, 2011
2,155
980
Sweden
Absolutely agree. It's interesting that making storytelling "fun" in Adobe's opinion means using only their content (except for snippets of your voice). This seems like nothing more than glorified clip-art in a PowerPoint, with recorded vocals.

That's exactly what this is. Had my 4 year old record a nice little 30 second snippet for her mom, but that is about all this is good for. To be fair it does have access to your photos, but not your music or videos.

The real killer here is that it doesn't save your projects locally on the device, and there is no option to open in dropbox for example. The only place to access your projects is on their servers. That is a huge turn off for me.

As it is, it isn't much more than a cute toy. iMovie for iOS is a far more powerful tool. Deleted this already.
 

charente

macrumors newbie
Nov 12, 2008
5
11
Bristol UK
Grab Video?

At the risk of sound naive, is it possible to 'grab' the output and save the file for example, as an mov, rather than 'share' via social media?
 

sgaske

macrumors newbie
Sep 18, 2013
4
0
While I agree that not being able to save your videos locally is annoying, there are workarounds if you're resourceful enough to think of them..

That being said, it astounds me how many people have already dismissed this as useless or a cute toy. Spending 30 seconds on something like this can't possibly give you a realistic perspective of the possibilities, duh.

In a little more than an hour I created a really cool informative video that I'm going to use to promote my startup, in addition to a local non profit organization. While I'm familiar with and experienced in final cut, premiere and iMovie, I find this to be a very easy way to create informative narrative videos without spending hours editing. Voice is an A+ app IMO.
 

bwig

macrumors newbie
May 18, 2014
1
0
Isn't the point of telling "your story" to use your own photos, videos, etc.? This isn't mentioned. I'm a pretty good story teller and stories have always been fun for me, I don't need Adobe to make them "fun again". This would be useful if I could use my own media, not licensed, stock images. Do I get to keep and use "my story" or does the content I create become Adobe's? Nothing is free, there's always a catch.

...but you can use your own photos!
 
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