OK – really practical session here. SMIL (Synchronized Media Integration Language – pronounced smile) is a markup language designed to present multiple media files together. SMIL presentations can integrate audio and video with images, test or many other media type.
The syntax and structure is similar to HTML, and the current version is SMIL 2.1 (released Dec 2005).
Some examples are a presentation by Stephen Emmott or presentation by Molly Holzschalg – you’ll need Quicktime or Realplayer to view these.
We are going to put together a presentation based on a set of slides from last years IWMW and an MP3 recording of the session.
Creating a SMIL presentation:
First you need to have some media to put together into a presentation. So – perhaps starting by recording some audio.
Then you need some software to edit the audio. We are going to use Audacity.
The kind of processing you need to do is:
Slide change timings (if you are synching with a slide presentation)
Editing
Equalisation
Amplification
Pitch change
Volume compression
Flitering (e.g. Noise reduction by Steinberg Cleanup)
File Compression (typically to mp3)
If you are wanting to combine powerpoint slides and an mp3 recording, you’ll need to export the powerpoint slides as graphics (powerpoint has an option to do this as jpegs or pngs)
Then you are ready to create the SMIL file. This has a <head> tag containing information about the appearance of the playback window. Then there is a <body> tag which contains information about what media (files) you want to play, and (where necessary) how long you want each file to be displayed (for the slide images).
I need to play around with this a bit more – we’ve done an example, but might try to do something of my own to put online later.
Very interesting, need to see a few examples, tried to load the example into my normal browser but it did not work. Does it require a plug-in or browser update?
To view SMIL files, you need a player – Realplayer and QuickTime are the most common players that support SMIL
Hi Owen – did you get anywhere with that SMIL authoring tool you downloaded?
I downloaded LimSee2, but haven’t had a proper play with it yet. On the brief look I had, ease of use didn’t jump out at me, but I probably need to give it more of a go.
A bit like the early days of html, for the simple stuff, doing the code by hand is easier than learning a software package!