Product: Ovation

Manufacturer: Serious Magic

Price: $84.95 until 13th Oct 2006 then $99.95 (which is around £55)

Platform: Windows XP, Windows 2000 

Free 15 day Trial: Download Now (61Mb)

In the beginning was the word, and some people got a bit bored, so Powerpoint came along and brought a bit of pazzazz to the show. But quite frankly that was back in the 1980's and it is about time our presentations looked up to date and lively again. Welcome to the wonderful world of Ovation by Serious Magic!

In short Ovation takes a dead simple presentation which you produce in Powerpoint, and turns it into stunningly beautiful and smoothly animated slide shows. If you're thinking 'oh yeah, well I can do animations in PowerPoint already', then you've clearly not quite grasped the enormity of what Ovation can do.

Admit it, think about the difference between the output from PowerPoint and what you see on the telly in terms of motion graphics. Comparable? No, not at all. PowerPoint is clunky to say the least, and the animations and 'special effects' are generally speaking awful and cheesy.

Watch this video to see what Ovation can do: Ovation Preview (WMV format)

If you've watched the video then you know a little of what this program can do. What you may not know is that it does it very very quickly. Whether you like PowerPoint's animations and effects or not, the truth is it still takes a long time fiddling about setting up each element in turn. Instead of all that, all you need to do if you've got Ovation is knock your slides together by simply typing a page title and then the page text, apply basic animations such as a disolve to all of them (simply to let Ovation know that something is animated, not how you want it to be animated), and then click the magic "Save and Go To Ovation" button in PowerPoint. Your PowerPoint Presentation will be saved for you and then imported in to Ovation. 

Once you've done that though your presentation will come to life. Ovation comes packaged with a number of templates which are all excellent. That's good because there is a slight weakness here. You can do absolutely nothing at all to change them! It would be good if you could change the fonts and sizes at least within Ovation but you can't. You can tell Ovation to hold on to the presentations formatting from within PowerPoint, but it would be easier to be able to change things within Ovation. That aside, the templates Ovation comes with are superb. But Serious Magic aren't content to rest on their laurels, they are developing more templates all the time and making them available as free downloads from their website! Best of all they are open to suggestions of new templates. I asked them for some church related ones and guess what - they're doing it!  

Presentation Controls

click to enlarge: Presenter

To be honest, the inclusion of a teleprompter isn't a surprise, as Serious Magic have been around for several years leading the market in video production products such as Visual Communicator and VlogIt! which have at their heart a superb teleprompter system to help in recording movies to camera easily and professionally. It is great to see it here in Ovation to help make live presenatations even easier.

You can alter the speed of the teleprompter to suit your style, and you can start and stop the presentation whenever you need.  

Also included are optional screens, called Add Deeper for those little asides or extra screens of information or images which you may or may not use during your presentation. It's a great feature which I've found really useful during sermons. The Deeper slides can either be an image or another slide within the PowerPoint presentation. This is a great feature allowing you easily to divert from the linear run of your talk, by adding in a repeat of a slide from later on or earlier in the presentation or more likely perhaps, an extra supporting image - such as a Biblical map, chart or photo of something. They're there to use if you want to, or omit without interupting your talk if you choose not to use them.

Dynamic Content
Some themes include the capability of including dynamic content. Dynamic content comes in two flavours in Ovation: the first, and most common is Dynamic Keywords; the second is Dynamic Images. Both are great.

Dynamic Keywords allow you to input up to three words or phrases. These are then blended into the PowerLook somehow (it varies depending on which PowerLook you choose), generally as a nice animated background feature. To give you an idea imagine using the keywords 'Love', 'Faith', and 'Hope' in a PowerLook which supports dynamic keywords. You might then see these words blende, half transparent, floating across the background behind your presentation. It's subtle and beautiful and effective.

click to enlarge: Dynamics

Ovation Player
Now then, it's all well and good to such an amazing program on your desktop computer at home in your study, but for those of us looking to use this in a church setting we've got to be sure that we can take the finished Ovation show and play it where it matters. Of course if you've got a laptop which you drag along to church with you then there's no worries, but many of us save our presentations onto a usb stick and copy it onto the church computer. What then for Ovation in that setting? Will you need two licenses? Heck no! The guys at Serious Magic have been working on a little gem called Ovation Player. It's still in beta form but we've been using it for a couple of months and had no problems with it yet. Basically it lets you save the ovation file (it uses a proprietary .ovn file extension) which can then be opened and played by the Ovation Player with the controls you need to work through the show seemlesly. It's pretty good, but of course doesn't have the full features of the Ovation program such as the teleprompter or any editing capabilities.

Summary
There is no doubt about it, Ovation is a top notch product. If there were criticsm to give I would happily give it. With Ovation there just isn't any. It's great. Full stop. Even the price is great. But don't just take my word for it, take the word of those leaving church after I've used it. I'm thankful that I get complemented on my sermons quite often, but now I get complemented on my presentations too. If I'm honest I sometimes get a bit jealous of Ovation because people are more inclined to ask me how I produced those slides than they are to ask me about the content of those slides. Hey ho. Anyway, today's hot tip - get Ovation!