One Camera…or Two?

[Bill Davis]

Using a digital still camera seems REALLY complicated to me. Why not just take a thumb drive along and having the presenter copy their PPt presentation directly to it?

That way you can “fix” the poor quality design if need be – making fonts bolder or changing to a more video friendly font.

Even if the presenter doesn’t want you messing with their slides, you can just have them export their slides as a series of JPGs.

This is just digital data. Why would you want to dumb down the raw data via camera to a 2d plane then have to mess with that afterwards???

Doesn’t make sense to me.

FCP since NAB 1999
creator: muti-track movies
http://www.starteditingnow.com

[Jeffrey Gould]

Well…now that you put it that way, I agree. And if the PP has animation that won’t help anyway. Sounded good at first.

Jeffrey S. Gould
Action Media Productions

[Rennie Klymyk]

I’d have to agree here. I’ve used my still camera when I’ve been called in by one speaker on short notice without proper planning and without involvement of all participants. It worked well for the situation I was in but if you have access to the original files that’s the way to go of coarse.

“everything is broken” ……Bob Dylan

[Mark Suszko]

Not a fan of using a still camera for grabbing the screens, you could use a consumer mini DV camcorder on a tiny set of sticks to do that and have audio and movement too, plus, it would all fit inside your “big boy” camera bag.

But here’s something: you don’t necessarily need a laptop to GIVE a powerpoint show, long as there’s a TV or projector with a composite NTSC input there, you can store the slides as jpegs and play them out of most no-name $30 digital stills cameras in slideshow mode. If really pressed, one could also use this method as a cheap feeder for a teleprompter, one page at a time, of course, and the whole page instead of scrolling, with no editing ability, but still… very compact… they come with a composite video out….

I often suggest to folks that are nervous or otherwise reticent about using a laptop in some places, that a $30 DVD player from the Walgreens will play a CD with jpegs on it and give you a fine slideshow, without any fancy programming, software or authoring required. If you can burn jpegs to a CD, you are in business. The remote usually also lets you zoom into the jpegs and pan around within them if you need to. If the DVD player gets stolen, you’re out less money than the gas it took to drive across town.

[Pat Ford]

Really enjoyed this discussion, especially Marks comments.

I wanted to agree that Powerpoint is spawn of the devil. However, corporate types consider it essential. I have used Camtasia with reasonable results. Much, much better than the scan converter. And we were using a good scan converter. I just got a cd with the slide presentation on it. With Camtasia running, I click through it, staying on each slide a couple seconds. Then I stretch the slides out to fit the hole.