Synthesia

Currently trialling the tool for building content/modules.

As a linear presentation tool with very basic animation functions it is fine

As for building this to working within and doing anything more than  embedding ( so can be embedded within Storyline and updated within Synthesia)  or filling the screen.

Current issues for me using more than are as follows.

Editing:

Within Synthesia.
You cannot define screen size - can only out put one size
So will have to re-edit in a premiere or crop in Storyline

There are now measurement tools - rulers guides or mention of pixels/ cms etc.

Although you can output audio(narration) it still exports as a video file - only option is to bring into quicktime and export audio only.

Newest animation feature allows you to add queues (markers) within your script so text/images appear at that instance. ( there is no timeline as such).

Storyline.
Biggest push back from you might find (from a few) is 'lip-synching' of the avatars - although Synthesia provides a multitude of avatars and voices - finding the right avatar to match the right voice, can be time consuming - I say match, more like looks better.

I have scaled back the videos within Storyline modules, so they play a great part in the screen real estate, just to hopefully reduce that burden and distraction.

For onboarding webinars and face to face training, it works really well - especially if you want to alter/amend on the fly - as it self contained, the product allows you to create templates that can be duplicated and re-edited.

I think the maximum video length on the enterprise package is approx 2.5 hours per video which is huge.

They are constantly updating and improving the application and whilst i was suing the trial they introduced another 5 upgrades and approx 10 new avatars with the new interactive face/shoulder shrug. wink/ smile responses - that can applied to different aspects of your script.

My main focus was to find out what i could do within Storyline - I sent back feedback, hope fully some of which will hope fully be listened to.

majority of feedback from creating out put for evaluation has been positive

We will see.

HeyGen is even better than Synthesia in my opinion. I've created avatars of myself which can be done really easily. All they need is a two minute video of you. Their voice cloning features are also excellent. https://app.heygen.com/home

Hi Matt.  Our organization is currently considering getting an AI subscription and we've started looking at both Synthesia and HeyGen.  Did you ever use Synthesia?  Just wondered why you prefer Heygen.  Also, with HeyGen, can your cloned voice simply be used as an audio voiceover (text-to-speech) without the visual of yourself, or can you not separate the two?   Thanks.  Arnold Sirull

We've used Synthesia quite a lot in recent projects.

Some of our project stakeholders love the results, others just can't get past the fact that the avatars don't look completely natural. 

One of the main benefits we've found is that the videos can be easily repurposed for use in translated courses.

It would be great if the videos supported transparent backgrounds, but they don't, so that needs to be kept in mind when dropping an avatar in to your Storyline course, as the video may cover any background graphics you have.