I have been using the Microsoft Producer tool lately in an ELearning project we are working on. It is a free download that will allow digital media (audio,video) to be merged with Powerpoint slides along a time line. It merges the assets along a timeline with a CSS defined template (which can also vary on the timeline) and rerenders the whole thing using Windows Media tools and creates a SCORM manifest and SCORM run time connections so that when zipped the result package becomes a SCO.
Some downsides though:
- it does not support Quicktime (.mov) media and as most production houses use MACs the exchange of media is more difficult than it should be
- there seems to be a few nasties especially in the template creation end that cause crashes and weird side effects
- seamless template transitions seem a little difficult to achieve
- productions only run effectively in IE
- productions seem to require the download and installation of a "PowerPoint animation" activex even if no animations are used -corporate settings where no installations are permitted might be troublesome
(P.S. I have summarized my learnings here.)
