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Syncing video with PowerPoint content in post
Hi! I am shooting some internal videos for my company. The shoot will be a talking head on a green screen along with content from a PowerPoint added in next to their head in post (possibly the actual slide… possibly titles). These speakers typically use the bullet points as framework for their talks and they don’t typically just read the slide. Where this sometimes becomes a challenge in post is matching the right slide (or title content) with what is being talked about. These talks can run an hour to 1.5 hrs.
I currently only have one camera to work with. I was thinking that I would do an over the shoulder shot to pick up the laptop they are running off of for reference if I had a second, but I have to make do.
Do you know any tricks or techniques that would make marrying the video content with the written content easier? I hate trying to guess where to put stuff.
Thanks!
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15 Replies
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Well, for under a hundred bucks you can get a scan converter to chain to the VGA output of the powerpoint source, and tuner-less DVD recorders are around $70 at Walmart. Run an extra audio line to the DVD recorder from the mic or the camera, …and now you have an isolated recording of just the slides, with the audio of the guy who’s clicking thru them as your guide track. use MPEG STREAMCLIP to ingest that as a track you can lay into your timeline, quick and easy, faster than real-time digitizing of a second camera tape for sure…
When adding the PPT slides to a video, I like to export them as TGA or TIF files for higher quality.
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Or, just go wide enough on your single camera shot to see both the presenter and enough of the presentation screen so that you can tell which slide is showing.
Then in your NLE, crop and resize the presenter shot to taste – and replace everything else with the full slide.
No extra gear or processes necessary.
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It’s a clever idea but I wouldn’t take the quality hit on my speaker footage doing it that way. The speaker is actually the most vital thing to capture in these things, because you can always get the slides again later.
I use a hybrid technique when shooting these things single-camera: I expose and focus for the speaker, then at key moments when they are repeating themselves or just taking a pause, I snap-zoom to get the slide screen for just a split second, then snap back to the podium. In post, the frame or two of the slide can be freeze-framed and stretched to cover, or just used as a marker for replacing with a tif file from the stack later. You have maximum flexibility this way.
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It sounds like the speaker is sitting facing the camera in the studio and the laptop is facing the speaker, the BACK of the laptop is facing the camera.
Chris
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That is correct. I guess I could attach another monitor that faces the camera.
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I would setup a second cam, even a cheap palm-corder, aimed at the screen for reference only and then insert the PPT files in the edit.
Chris
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I’ve been producing these sort of presentations for 6 years now, and it all boils down to two choices, you either have a second camera to record the slide timing or you are going to have to guess.
Here’s a sample of what I produce almost every week of the year…
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Yep, very similar to the kind of thing I am doing. Looks like I am going to need some gear!
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This is what I do and it works very well. I then just lay down markers for the slide transitions and use that to trigger slides exported as images. It’s actually a pretty fast way of doing it, and you don’t end up with several gigabytes of still powerpoint slides.
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What are you using to make those, Guy; MS producer, or something els?
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