powerpoint to video

[Michael Brown]

1. Export each slide as a TIFF file.
FILE > SAVE AS > .tif > EVERY SLIDE
2. If needed, run these through a Photoshop batch process to shrink them into safe title, and slow down screaming colors.
This technique will NOT preserve any PP builds or transitions. If you must keep them, play the presentation through a scan converter out to tape or direct capture.

Mike Brown
Video/Film Producer
American Heart Association

[Peter]

thank you that sounds great

[Peter]

can you recomend a good scan converter?

[Peter]

can you recomend a good scan converter?

[Mark Suszko]

I did in this same thread in the FCP forum. Communications Specialties Scan-Do Pro or Pro- D (digital). Ours was six grand a few years back. Worth every penny though. Don’t panic over that figure, depending on just how special your needs are, you can get away with buying o ne for under a hundred (Averkey imicro), or you can rent better ones than you can afford to buy.

There are screen capture utilities, I know, like camtasia and that one that’s popular for macs right now… forgot the name for aminute, is it Snapz Pro?… but these are always going to lose you some resolution going to .AVI, typically a scan converter worth, say $300 or more is going to give a better output than the screen grab utility, IMO. Your mileage varies depending on the signal chain from the scan converter on into the rest of your system.

[Chuck Reti]

[Michael D. Brown] “If needed, run these through a Photoshop batch process to shrink them into safe title, and slow down screaming colors.
“
The usual problem encountered with PPT slides not intended for video use is, in addition to no bleed for title safe area,
the tendency of PPT composers to want to cram as much type on a frame as possible. Projected on a large screen with a
good data projector, they can (Lord forgive me for saying this) look OK. Squeezed through the low-rez medium we work in, typical small type and serif fonts usually turns into little balls of fuzz, and everyone complains how bad they look (and can you “enhance” them?). Usually helps if possible to work with the graphic artist to make sure good, clear typefaces are used, optimal use of color and color contrast as viewed on a video monitor, no type smaller than 20 or 24 point, not too many lines of copy on screen at a time. This often means making 2 or 3 or more slides for video out of one original PPT presentation slide, but they’ll be readable on the DVD or VHS dubs!

—
Chuck Reti
VIdeo Editor
Detroit MI

[Peter Difalco]

Regardless of the program you use, here’s a slight tip from experience: if you can use an uncompressed editing solution, DO IT. Because DV compression mangles text and fine graphics. A powerpoint to video project I edited graphics on received complaints from the client because the editor took my beautiful TIFFs and put them into a DV compressed timeline before further compressing it to DVD.

best of luck,

Peter DiFalco
Technical Supervisor
Academy of Art University

[Mike Cohen]

We have been doing a series of lectures on DVD – our editor spends countless hours re-creating the powerpoints in Photoshop, allowing us to do graceful builds, maintain safe area, ntsc colors, avoiding ugly powerpoint backgrounds, and really improving things. Obviously graphs and charts and research data still look like too much information on the screen, but what can you do.

Mike