This may be of interest to some or you or of no interest to any of you. I am busy working on a project, but have been bumbling about for some time until this weekend.

The visual part:
I discovered some software called anim8or. It is available from www.anim8or.com. It lets you generate either stills or moving video in 3D. It is powerful enough to generate pretty good things, if you have the time. I downloaded some basic free 3D models from net and generated some stills and motion video (you can move both objects and the camera) to act as my scenes. Not too difficult to use - took me a few hours otherwise I would not be using it.

The audio part:
Having a basic script, I found some decent text-to-speech software. Before you cringe, look at http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html. It saves the output as a wave. Very easy to use.

Putting it together:
I then use Vegas to put the video and audio parts together. The good thing is, you can speed up or slow down video clips in time with the sound. This will help when it comes to film each scene as you know more or less, how long to shoot for. It also helps in deciding on the final edit and look you are going for.

Reviewing:
I then render to a simple NTSC DV widescreen profile - saves time. I then use PSP Video 9. www.pspvideo9.com and convert it. I then download this to my PSP and view it. Really good when you are on the road and need the next best thing to a TV. Also good, if you do not have a secondary external monitor.

Anyway's, after half a day today, I am quite happy with the first 2 minutes of my project