I've been shooting some academic conferences and lately and wanted to get advice from any veterans who've been doing it longer. How do you handle the syncing between the powerpoint slides and the speaker? I ended up using Presto for a bit but frankly it's a pain.

I've a conference coming up and am considering shooting the speaker and shooting the screen with a decent camera. I also want to do a video capture of the powerpoint on the computer itself. With a bit of syncing, that may end up giving me the best quality for showing slides and cutting down time in post for syncing all the slides up. Anyone have experience with this? Did it work out?

Next conference I'm also going to use the speakers computer to output not just the powerpoint but jpegs so I can be sure that I don't have any wonky font or picture issues.

Any other tips for shooting conferences?

Also, I don't know which forum this should go to so I just put it here. Please move it or lemme know to delete it. :)

First, get the jpegs from the powerpoint.

Then you use your best video camera, with the good audio feed for the speaker giving the presentation.

You get any cheap video camera with on camera microphone (scratch audio) for the screen, exposure adjusted for the screen.

The audio from the cheap camera will show you where to drop in the powerpoint slide jpegs to synch up with the video of the presenter from your best camera.

Awesome. Thanks!

I used Presto to help sync up the slides automatically and exported some FCP XML for the autosync. Not perfect but it's a start.

Red Giant - Products - Presto 2.1.1 (http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/presto/)

I usually use two cameras: one, tight, on the speaker; and two, wide, showing the speaker and the screen.

Tracking down a powerpoint or pdf of the presentation is generally more difficult, and more of an exercise in psychology than videography, so I won't go into that here. But with the two cameras and the presentation itself, you have everything you need.