Apple Mac OS X Server v10.6 - Manual (Page 11)

Chapter 1 Podcast Composer Overview 11
How Podcast Composer Works
Podcast Composer groups the process of building a workflow into seven stages that
step you through the process of creating a workflow:
Stage 1. Information You specify basic workflow information: workflow name,
workflow author’s name, and a brief description of the workflow.
Stage 2. Import You tell the workflow what to expect as input: a single QuickTime
movie, two QuickTime movies, or a set of documents that are compatible with Quick
Look. The output of this stage is a single QuickTime movie. If the input to this stage is
two movies, Podcast Composer produces a picture-in-picture movie. If the input to this
stage is documents, Podcast Composer produces treats document pages as images
and renders them into a movie with transitions between the images. If a document is
a video, Podcast Composer concatenates it with the other documents as a movie.
Stage 3. Edit You specify how you want to brand the podcast that this workflow
produces by adding watermarks, introduction, title, and exit movies. The output of
this stage is called the Edited Master movie. This stage produces a high-quality movie
at the highest possible resolution based on the resolution of the input movies. The
Edited Master movie is a flat QuickTime media file that is used in the following stages
of the workflow.
Stage 4. Export You select the different types of encodings to be used for publishing
your podcast. For example, you might want your podcast to be available in three
flavors: iPhone/iPod, Apple TV, and AAC (audio-only).
Stage 5. Publish You determine how the podcast is published. For example, you can
configure the Publish stage to publish the different versions of the podcast to the
Podcast Library.
Stage 6. Notify You create the notifications that you want the workflow to send after
the podcast is published. You can send notifications to users and administrators with
instruction on how to access the podcast. You can also send notifications to services to
let them know that new content is published to the Podcast Library.
Stage 7. Summary You verify your selections. If no more changes are required, you
deploy the workflow to Podcast Producer server.
When working on a particular stage, Podcast Composer keeps the previous and next
stages in view to provide context.
The workflow that you generate using Podcast Composer is a file bundle. A workflow
bundle contains the code, resources, credentials, workflow description, and all the
information needed to execute the workflow.
In the Export, Publish, and Notify stages, you can’t have more than nine elements
per stage.