Adobe Visual Communicator

~ the goodbye ~

Every video editor ever built puts a timeline along the bottom of the screen and asks you to drag clips onto it. Serious Magic looked at that in 2003 and decided the timeline was the reason ordinary people could not make a video, so Visual Communicator replaced it with a teleprompter. You wrote your script and the words scrolled up your own monitor while a webcam recorded your face reading them. Graphics and name captions fired on cue as the script went past. Editing became the thing you did by writing rather than the thing you did afterward.

It was a Windows product from a company in California run by Mark Randall, who gave himself the title Chief Magician and had a real talent for building tools for people the professional software ignored. Serious Magic's other products went the same way: Ultra did broadcast-quality chroma keying in a badly lit room, and DV Rack turned a laptop into a field recorder.

Adobe bought the company on 19 October 2006, mostly for the video technology and for what it could do to Flash video, and Randall became a strategist inside Adobe. Visual Communicator 3.0 came out on 25 September 2007 under the Adobe name. That was the last major version it ever got.

This one never had a chance of reaching me. Its home was the American school newscast, a format where a couple of fourteen-year-olds read announcements into a camera every morning and the whole building watches it on classroom televisions. Turkish schools of my era had a loudspeaker in the corridor and a teacher with a microphone, so the entire problem this software existed to solve was one my country had already answered with a cable and a switch.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the teleprompter ~

The design idea holds up better than most software from 2003. A timeline asks you to think about video as a sequence of objects in time, which is correct and which is also why most people give up. A teleprompter asks you to think about it as a thing you say out loud, and almost everyone already knows how to do that.

The graphics were pinned to positions in the script, so bringing up a name caption was a matter of putting a marker in the sentence where the name appeared. If you have ever watched a local news broadcast and wondered how a small station puts one together in twenty minutes, this was that workflow, packaged for a computer lab.

~ the school newscast ~

Teachers and students were the core market and Adobe never really pretended otherwise. There was an education version with a licensing structure aimed at school districts. Behind that sat a quieter customer base of churches and small businesses making announcement videos with a tripod and a fluorescent light.

That customer base is also the trap. Schools buy once and keep the machine for eight years, so the revenue arrives in lumps and then stops, and a product line inside a company the size of Adobe has to justify a team against Photoshop numbers.

~ how it ended ~

Adobe stopped development and sales on 1 June 2013 and told users to look at Premiere Elements or Premiere Pro CC instead, which is a fair recommendation and completely misses the point of what they were being moved off. Both of those put a timeline back at the center of the screen, which is the one thing Visual Communicator existed to get away from.

By 2013 the market had moved underneath it anyway. Webcams had a record button and YouTube had an upload form, and the phone in a student's pocket shot better video than the DV camera the software had been designed around. The specific trick of writing your video and then reading it aloud went back into the professional broadcast world it came from, where it had been standard since the 1950s and where nobody had ever thought of it as a feature.

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