Pachyderm - Multimedia Authoring Made Easy

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on


I came across Pachyderm at a presentation at Montclair State University by their OIT department a few months ago. It is offered to members of The New Media Consortium.

Pachyderm is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool for people who have little or no experience using products like Flash, but want to create Flash-based multimedia products.

It is an online application accessed with a web browser. Users are taken through a number of selection steps using template choices.

You upload your own images, audio clips, and short video clips and assemble them using the templates. You can add text in the program or copy/paste it from existing sources.

The application takes the screens you complete and links them, then allowing you to "publish" and download. The  result in  a Flash-based multimedia package that can have images, sound, animation and text. You can use it on a website, CD as a standalone presentation etc.

It seems that you can also leave presentations (host) on the Pachyderm server and link to them, though I suspect this is for NMC members only.

At NJIT, we have been in contact with developers and will be installing an instance here to experiment with this spring semester.

The project looks very robust. You can follow their work on the Pachyblog.

The Pachyderm 2.0 Project is a partnership led by The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The
project brings software development teams and digital library experts from six NMC universities together with counterparts from five major museums to create a new, open source authoring environment for creators of web-based and multimedia learning experiences. The new tool will be based on Pachyderm, the authoring and publishing tool developed by SFMOMA to author its successful series, Making Sense of Modern Art. More information about the project at http://www.pachyderm.org/

Pachyderm
is web-based rich-media interactive (flash) presentation authoring and publishing system. It works off of an extensible template system, and plug-ins can be written to tie into multiple external asset databases. Released under Apache lic. v.2.0 - information on obtaining the code at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pachyderm

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