Filming Slide Show- Any Tips?

[Robert Young]

I'm shooting a lecture/power point presentation with the EX1 next week. The final destination for this is DVD and web.
I've never been real happy with the video reproduction of slides in a live shoot and was planning to just insert the powerpoint assets directly into the edit as stills. But, that's a lot of extra work.
If anyone has any tips for getting acceptable results shooting live, I would appreciate hearing them.
Thanks

[Andrew Hollister]

Living most of my life in PowerPoint and video.... I'm with you, slides in a live shoot stinks.

I've found it easier to just insert the PPT gfx (output to tif, bmp whatever your flavor of choice is) onto your time-line. The last presentation I did, I had a second smaller camera just shooting a wide shot so I could match PPT to VID.

I produced another shoot recently of Bruce Mau, and we kept the PPT screen in the shot, but it wasn't good enough for the client, and we had to go back and lay in the actual slides.

The fun* part was recreating the PPT in a 16x9 format to match the EX1's frame. Good times, good times.

[Kevin Wayne Jones]

I never bother to shoot the PP screen. I shoot the Presenter/Speaker, than convert the powerpoint slides into jpegs or photoshop stills and edit them into the timeline at the appropriate place.

kj

[Robert Young]

Originally Posted by Kevin Wayne Jones

I never bother to shoot the PP screen. I shoot the Presenter/Speaker, than convert the powerpoint slides into jpegs or photoshop stills and edit them into the timeline at the appropriate place.

kj

Yeah. That was my plan. I was hoping for an easy way out, but I guess not.
Thanks to all

[Andrew Hollister]

But if you aren't catching some of the screen, then you are having to listen to the presso... which, to me, seems painfully slow in the edit suite. Especially if its an all day meeting.

To each his own, I suppose.

[Bruce Rawlings]

I usually end up recreating the ppts as no one ever thinks of font size or tv safe area when they make them. The wide angle safety shot saves sooooo much time later.

[Tom Vaughan]

I would strongly suggest using a program such as Cyberlink's PowerDirector to create the slide show from the original photos / images. This will render the photos into high quality video in the format of your choice. There are many other options available, including motion (the "Ken Burns" effect), transitions, audio, etc.

Tom

[Robert Young]

My thought was to just drop the PP slides into Photoshop, render out at the desired rez and title safe size, then bring into the project as stills.
As far as placement, I was planning to use a small cam to video the projected slides, then in post I can fast forward thru this reference tape and get the time code cue for the inserts on the timeline. Once the stills are on the timeline I can fine tune placement, duration, etc.
That's my theory anyway.

[Andrew Hollister]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

My thought was to just drop the PP slides into Photoshop, render out at the desired rez and title safe size, then bring into the project as stills.
As far as placement, I was planning to use a small cam to video the projected slides, then in post I can fast forward thru this reference tape and get the time code cue for the inserts on the timeline. Once the stills are on the timeline I can fine tune placement, duration, etc.
That's my theory anyway.

Considering that PowerPoint absolutely blows at converting to raster files... you'll need an interim file between PowerPoint and Photoshop, I would recommend PDF. PDF retains font information, so you can rasterize it at any resolution you want. Big enough for an HD timeline.

You'll definitely need to fine tune, as presenters never seem to advance their slides when they really want to.

The other option to rasterize, if you are on a pc, and can locate a copy, would be SuperPrint. It does a bang up job ripping files to images.

[Ross Herewini]

I was researching for an upcoming job to so similar. I thought my best option would be to use Camtasia. Has anyone used it to record the whole session to AVI?

[Matt Davis]

Saving each slide as a PNG can work, but can have unexpected results when complex builds are used.

Pumping out presenter + slide work is 'sausage factory' work for me, so as a Mac based editor in a PC PPT world, I keep sane and profitable by

1) Shooting a wide shot to know when slides (and other things) happen

2) Doing screen grabs of the PPT in full screen mode at appropriate parts of the build

Things can go wrong, so Bootcamp/Win XP helps. Even so, screen capture is the way to go for me.

I work on a matched locked off wide and manned close-up cam side by side - I can vary the wide from time to time, great for Q&A too. Sometimes I use multicam, mostly I just put the two cameras in sync, place the slides, then cut out the wide and shuffle the PPT as I see fit. Delivers a high quality result.

Having got the quality, I used to try to do PiP, animated 3D moves and so on, but nobody noticed, nobody cared and nobody would pay for it. What people want, and pay for, is good, stable, compatible and cost effective web delivery of the finished result.

BTW, I've been shooting on a couple of Z1s for years, but now thanks to the gurus who inhabit DVinfo, we have the Kensington 7-1 and SanDisk Ultra III solutions (thank you to all on that thread!), I'm looking forward to switching to EX1s - and saving heaps of ingest time!

[Andrew Hollister]

Watching a few TED.com presentations will give you some ideas. They do it very well.

[Robert Young]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hollister

... you'll need an interim file between PowerPoint and Photoshop, I would recommend PDF. .

Andrew
THis is my first attempt at stripping assets from PP. How do I get from, for example, a jpeg photo with PP applied graphics nested in the PP project to a PDF file of same. Does PP have an export function for this?? Is it done with Acrobat??
I very much appreciate your experience with this.

[Eli Schmukler]

I may be totally wasting your time with the following suggestion - I am basically a computer literate U. S. tax attorney who uses video for lectures and web presentations - but really knows little about the video aspects of things - however, take a look at Adobe Acrobat 9 - the highest level product version - as it includes new capabilities involving video, powerpoint, flash, adobe presenter (which is included with the Acrobat Extended software) and pdf files. See:

Adobe - Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended: Features

and

Adobe - Adobe Presenter



I suspect that you will get more out of the information that adobe has provided than I did - but for me, it seems that it will make web and dvd presentations much easier - and very interactive if I so desire. (I believe that there are many ways to distribute pdf on the web and many ways to convert flv files to other general video formats useable on dvds.)

If the information is not helpful - forgive me for wasting your time. If it does prove to be useful - I would appreciate any insights you may have.

[Robert Young]

Eli
It does look like Acrobat/Presenter v. 9.0 will import Power Point projects and convert them to PDF for "cross platform sharing".
Thanks for the link
Actually, playing around with this a bit, it looks easier than I thought. If I right click on a PP Project, I get the option to convert to PDF in the drop down. Acrobat ( I have v. 7.1 Standard) will convert each slide to a PDF page. These pages will import into Photoshop CS3 wherein they can be resized, rerezzed, etc. and saved in whatever format I like for import into the video editor.
Looks pretty slick.