Serious Magic Vlog It

With the growth of cheap file storage on the Internet, the humble text blog has been supplanted by the photo and now the video blog.

The idea is that bloggers can create short snippets of video and post them online, either as the sole content or as part of a general blog.

Serious Magic Vlog It attempts to make the creation and uploading process both easy and quick.

We've got our hands on a beta copy - the final version is expected to be launched at the end of February.

In general, it works well. Installation was relatively painless, and included setting up a free 30 day trial account on a server to host the uploaded video files - after this period, various hosting options are available from $9.99 (£5.60 approx) per month.

On trying to run the software for the first time, Vlog It complained it could not run with the current Windows font size.

Although this hadn't been a problem for any other software, the program forced us to change it - we expect this issue to be remedied in the final version.

The program is easy to use, although the interface is a little simplistic with help text all over the place rather than using menus. But it would have been good to have some control over how basic or advanced the options were.

Creating a clip, either using a video camera, webcam or a pre-recorded video file, is simple. You can also add narration and effects, although some of these were a little tricky to get to grips with.

Video files are created in the Flash format and the uploading process is taken care of by the software. The program provides a link to the file for you to copy into the blogging or html software.

During testing, the link code didn't work in Blogger, probably the most-used blogging software, but it worked perfectly on a 20six.co.uk blog, a popular alternative. Again, we expect this issue to be ironed out when the final version arrives.

Using Vlog It, it's easy to create impressive looking video blogs in next to no time and hopefully the final release will sort out the problems raised above.

Serious Magic has a forum where the topic of the release date is currently being discussed - you can take a look at it here. Creative has also said that it will bundle the software with some of its webcams, once it is realeased.

System requirements:
933MHz PIII
256MB of Ram
CD-Rom drive
200MB hard drive
Windows 2000/XP

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