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How to deliver a Powerpoint job
I’ve been given 9 Powerpoint presentations and 9 mp3’s of the corresponding talks to edit. Up to me how I deliver, but it has to be on 1 disc (either CD or DVD).
My instinct is to edit within Final Cut and make a DVD in DVDSP, but I don’t think it will fit on 1 DVD and Dual Layer discs are too scary and unreliable.How would people deliver this job? I think even giving them back 9 Powerpoints with audio added will suffice but being a Mac user I wanna give them something slicker than that!
Sean
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14 Replies
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How long are the presentations? Is it just graphics, or are you saying you’re working with video of someone doing a presentation?
This is what I would do if I was delivering on DVD and it was to be used for a presentation:
-Animate each PowerPoint slide in After Effects/Motion. Render off each slide, and also make a freeze frame of each one.
-Insert your slides into a timeline in DVDSP, with the corresponding freeze in between each one. Make your freezes quite long (maybe a minute long).
-Place chapter markers at the start and end of each freeze. On the FIRST marker (I’ll call it Freeze Page 1 IN), set it’s end jump to be Freeze Page 1 IN. This means that when the slide plays it’ll get to the freeze. After one minute it’ll jump back to the freeze, and will keep doing that until the person doing the presentation clicks the ‘Next Chapter’ button on the remote. The same as a mouse click in PowerPoint.
The benefit of doing this rather than just using a PowerPoint is the advantage of being able to create better graphics, and insert video easily or an animated logo that could loop round etc.
Depending on how long the presentations are I would have thought you could do this on a single DVD, or certainly a dual layer – what scares you about them?
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Thanks Alex,
But I should have explained it better. Sometimes I film these presentations, then edit them with the slide as the main graphic, the presenter picture-in-picture, and the audio running too.
On this occasion however, I have been given the 9 presentations (about 45 minutes each), and an audio recording of each presentation. I have to cut the slides to the audio. They’re a mixture of text slides and medical graphics. The client wants people who attended the conference to have an audio-visual record of each talk, on one disc.
I’ve started to edit them in FCP, (exported the slides from Keynote), slides changing with the relevant audio, but from experience when I output them to mpeg-2 they will not fit on a single layer disc.
Dual layer discs are scary in the sense that I made one once and sat there while the client tried to play it in 5 separate DVD players. It played in 2 of them.Sean
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To get them all onto one DVD you can really only allow 500mb per 45minute video – the quality would be terrible. A lot of the edits to DVD we do are around 45mins long and they come in at 2.4 GB. I can’t imagine that 1/5 of that quality would be acceptable for your client, but you could always try it on say a 30 second segment. I think you’d need to encode that at no more than 1.5mbits/sec. That should give you roughly 500mb/45 mins.
Other than that, I’d say do a bit of research into why your dual layer DVD may not have worked before. If you can find a fix you’d be able to double the quality of your files. After all, it must be possible to make good dual layer DVDs as a lot of Hollywood films are. It’s not something I’ve had to do though, so I’m afraid I can’t offer any help on that.Good luck,
Alex -
Dual layer discs are totally possible, you just have to find the proper split point and don’t let DVDSP do it for you. If you have 9 persentations, try 4 on one layer and 5 on the other. Also, you might want to look at enocding your audio as ac3. If you are already doign that, try a different encoder (such as BitVice). Bitvice makes very nice pictures often at a fraction of the data rate of Compressor. You will still have to use Compressor to encode the audio as ac3 if you go the bitvice route.
Jeremy
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I’ve had to do similar jobs. Exporting each slide then bringing it into motion or final cut. In FCP how about using your browser? Set it to show icons rather than a list then place each slide in order left to right and descending. Then drag a marquee round them and load them all into your viewer. Do a overlay edit with transition and they’ll all be happily in order fading into each other. You can then add your audio and roll each clip to fit.
As far as delivery goes I add chapter markers in FCP then export as QT movie including markers. I give this file to the client on either a pen drive or dvd-rom. You could compress your finished file if more space is required. Your clients should be able to manage playing a QT through their laptops right?
Dan
MediaBaby
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You could convert your PowerPoints to a Flash-based video using software from Articulate or others who mainly service the e-Learning world. There are lots of solutions that allow you to use video clips. The output file sizes are relatively small and they will play through the browser.
Craig Sawchuk
Changes Communications -
[Mark Suszko] “Does that sound right to any of you guys that use DVDSP? “
It’s been a long time since I tried it, but I did try it once and it’s hard to time out the frames to audio without a bunch of programming. It’s easy if you know that each slide has to be 5 seconds with a 12 frame dissolve, though.
Jeremy
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If I understand the description, there are NO shots of people talking for any of these, they are just the slides and a voice-over, reading them? “Radio with pictures”?
If I remember right, you can put slide shows into a DVD in DVDSP. If your disk in slide show mode is generating a single still frame per page with audio, that’s way less data overhead than an mpeg stream, I reckon. Maybe this is a more compact way to deliver and still be a DVD in standard DVD format? Does that sound right to any of you guys that use DVDSP?
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Convert your PP slides into jpgs. Make sure they are video friendly. If they are not, you need to recreate them or scale down by 10%. Duplicate any animated slides.
You can always open the PP in Keynote.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
I actually really like how well powerpoint for mac works with my mac and FCP, I can export to FCP from the PPT as video or as a folder of jpeg stills. The jpegs can take up very little drive space, but play as long as you want to, since the drives just repeat the still over and over to make the time you set. The export as video takes up a bit more space in the scratch drive, even though the video is just repeated frames of a still.
I don’t think that’s this guy’s trouble, though. What’s happening to him somewhere along the line, I think, is that during compression into the m2 files for burning the DVD, something is making his files so big he can’t fit them all into a single layer. Which seems crazy for stills and audio.
Cutting the audio down to mono at a lower bit rate should help a tiny little bit in freeing up space, but the mpeg compression should be making those jpeg stills pretty compact, since nothing is changing on the screen after each slide initially comes up. So I would be looking into the specific bit depth and compression settings in FCP and DVDSP, and seeing if something is getting re-translated back into a “fatter” format that we don’t know about. If I can burn 4 to 6 hours of video onto a disk with a stand-alone DVD recorder on single-layer DVD-R, he should be able to get this project done, with higher quality in less space, on a single disk too.
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