Wildform Flair 5 review

With its slide creation, PowerPoint conversion, video encoding, screen recording and quiz capabilities, Flair offers new users plenty of functionality at an excellent price. So far, however, there's been no real standout feature to encourage existing users to upgrade. The capability that Wildform hopes will fill this role is the new support for long form presentations that break the Flash format's in-built 16,000 frame limit (around nine minutes at 30 fps).

But the process for doing this is awkward, involving a new play mode that allows the main timeline to stop while external SWFs and FLVs are playing and resume when they finish. This smashes the Flash barrier and means that you could theoretically play 16,000 movies one after the other. Unfortunately, stopping or muting the external file affects the main timeline, a problem Wildform solves by including players with no Stop or Mute button!

This isn't a solution at all - it's a nightmare. The real solution to providing more than nine minutes worth of material isn't to chain it all together, but rather to break it into chunks and wrap it up in an advanced player with an interactive front end. This puts the end user in control, makes the most of the Flash format and immediately gives your production the smack of quality. Without this professional wrapper, Flair's barebones output just can't compete with high-end rivals.

Thanks to its surprising range of power and bargain price, many occasional users will be willing to forgive Flair its many rough edges. But it clearly isn't the right program for regular users looking for professional authoring and truly professional output.

Author: Tom Arah