This is really only directly relevant for people producing multimedia for the web - but Joe Weiss, genius/inventor of Soundslides has released a beta version of his software that allows the export of audio slideshows straight to video.

Soundslides, if you are not familiar, has created a growing revolution of multimedia photojournalism at newspapers big and small across the country. The Telegraph has been using it for about a year to create most of our work:

Bob Ragsdale

A Tribute: Laban Anthony Kimungu

Summer’s Warriors

The genius is how the software lets the journalist focus on taking good photos and gathering good audio, and not on the arcane skills involved in programming in Flash.

In any case, the new Soundslides to Video feature will now allow us to easily export to many different formats and platforms.

In the long run this will mean we can offer our multimedia content to our readers where and when they want it - be it on your iPod, television, or even as a download to your laptop for offline viewing.

Thanks Joe.