What software package should I use? [Intentionally Ambiguous Title]

[jackophant]

Sorry this isn't really on topic, but I was hoping someone here might be able to help out / point me in the right direction.

 

The company I work for, a small travel agent chain, have decided they want some sort of visual playback in their client facing shops showcasing a few lovely panoramas, latest deals and a few ads.

 

One of the agents knocked together a very rough After Effects file in his spare time which functionally was not much more than a glorified PowerPoint presentation. I initially looked into After Effects and Premiere Pro but chose Ae and started poring over tutorials for After Effects and Premiere Pro, but then I found out that they want to be able to update it regularly as well, potentially a couple of times a week.

 

The way I was going to compose the "video" was a playlist of 30-120 second clips so that we can playback through something like Windows Media Player and mix and match, and if anything needed to be updated it was a single file and not re-rendering an entire video.

 

As can be the way, they're very casual about the whole situation and just expect a finished product.

 

What should I use? I'm seriously considering PowerPoint now, but was hoping for the chance to use Ae/Pr as an opportunity to learn something new. Is there an entirely better product that I've completely missed?

 

[Vaya]

if it doesn't have video just use MS photogallery on 'contemporary' slideshow.

 

source - Cheapass IT technician supporting a company on little/no budget

[Sigma]

If you do need it to be video, After Effects is absolutely a great way to go for what you are describing. I used it in this fashion at a previous job I had (granted resolution was low spec.'s so rendering times were small). Just my 2 cents.

[jackophant]

I've done a bit more digging and InDesign can even be utilised as a PowerPoint alternative with adobe PDF supporting video playback and timed page/slide changes...

 

I would like to throw myself into AE but with the nature of the travel industry, unless it's a limited time offer (which will still expire and have to be changed) as soon as you post a price it's immediately out of date and it seems massively inefficient to keep updating series of video clips every week to stay up to date...

 

I was even maybe thinking connecting to our price database and making an HTML/CSS "slide show" with help from jQuery/php so it can update itself (I'll just assign some variables that I update from a text document) and self reference on the last slide to go back to the start. It would support all the standard web trimmings, but there would be a drawback 

 

SO MANY OPTIONS