Digital Media Production | News

Adobe Project Rome Brings Multimedia Authoring to Education

• By David Nagel
• 10/24/10

Adobe has launched a new multimedia authoring tool for education. Dubbed Project Rome, the hosted service (also available as a desktop AIR app) went into public preview Sunday morning. Adobe said it's looking for schools to participate in pilot programs using the software, especially those schools that have adopted Google's Apps for Education or the open source learning management system Moodle.

Project Rome for Education is designed to allow students and educators to create multimedia presentations that include text, video, audio, images, animation, and interactivity. Its layout engine, which resembles the one found in Adobe's professional page layout tool, InDesign, provides a full range of typeface and formatting controls, as well as paragraph controls, text flow from one text box to another, and text wrap for automatically wrapping copy around images and other page elements.

It also offers drawing tools and a Flash-like timeline for animating elements based on various parameters, such as opacity, position, rotation, and other transformations.

The hosted version of Project Rome for Education running in Safari.

Some other features include:

• Support for embedding videos from YouTube;
• Templates for creating presentations (as well as support for creating projects from scratch);
• Output to print, PDF, Flash, JPEG, interactive PDF, and other formats; and
• Cross-platform collaborative workflows and file sharing via Moodle and Google.

Two versions of Project Rome are being previewed currently. The education edition is designed to integrate with Moodle and Google Apps. It supports federated login and "Internet content protection" and is also designed to satisfy schools' "IT infrastructure requirements," according to Adobe.

Project Rome for Education is currently up and running as a public preview as both a hosted application and a desktop application. A release date for the final version has not yet been set. Adobe also said it has not finalized pricing, but the final release is expected to be available on a subscription basis for individuals and institutions. Further information can be found here.