Using Other Programs to Capture PowerPoint as Video (for the Web or DVD)

By Tom Bunzel

Note: This article is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in "Solving the PowerPoint Predicament:  Using Digital Media for Effective Communication," Que, 2006.

Using Camtasia Studio 3.0 for PowerPoint Video
In Chapter 5, we mentioned that one of the components of a DVD project with PowerPoint would be to export the presentation as a complete video. This has been available for the Mac version of PowerPoint for a while, but just recently, a PowerPoint add-in has been created by TechSmith Camtasia that lets a user capture an entire presentation as it is presented, with all of the animation, transitions, and even the video.
 
The production is saved as a standard video file in a Windows format,generally .AVI or .WMV.

Camtasia Studio 3.0 takes this a step further, allowing the user to appear with the presentation in a “video in a window.” This has a variety of applications:

• If you can’t physically present—sending a video of the presentation along with yourself in a window and your actual message as an audio track is probably the next best thing to being there.
• If you want to rehearse or get comments from colleagues—using the video version of the presentation gives the audience (and you) the best possible idea of how you intend to present the visuals and
  convey your message, and adjustments can be made.
• If you want to post the video on a web page or burn it to a DVD— we will cover these techniques more completely in Chapter 7.

Unfortunately, Camtasia Studio is not cheap—as of this writing, the full version was around $300. This makes it comparable to higher-end video editing programs, and in truth, that is exactly what the full program looks like (see Figure 6-26). The full portion of Camtasia resembles Windows Movie Maker, but it has other features (like a separate video and audio timeline) and can be used as a full-scale video editor. It also supports a wide range of output formats, with the exception of MPG; however, if you combine it with a DVD authoring program, you will have the ability to create MPG files for DVD production as well.

FIGURE 6-26 Camtasia Studio works as a complete video editing package, with the ability to separate audio and video tracks.

We want to concentrate on the Camtasia Add-In for PowerPoint,which is a toolbar that appears in PowerPoint’s editor. (If you’ve loaded the program and the toolbar doesn’t appear, click View > Toolbars > Camtasia in PowerPoint.) On the toolbar, you can first check your recording options (see Figure 6-27).
 

CAMTASIA FOR TRAINING The Camtasia toolbar also features the ability to add a highlight of the cursor movements so that students can watch a trainer go through various steps when demonstrating software.

IF NECESSARY, USE MOVIE MAKER TO CONNECT FIREWIRE Sometimes,Camtasia favors a USB video camera over the Firewire connector. You can work around this by first setting up to capture Firewire in Movie Maker (as described in Chapter5) and then configuring Camtasia; it usually will locate the Firewire digital camcorder after Movie Maker or another application has connected to it.
 

FIGURE 6-28 Camtasia Studio’s toolbar in PowerPoint lets you configure your microphone
and a video capture device.

With the camera and microphone configured properly, all that’s left is to press the red Record button. A popup screen will determine when recording will actually start and will prompt you on “hot keys” for pausing and stopping the recording process. The presentation will play full screen as usual (you won’t see your video image during recording).

When capture is completed, the project is opened automatically in the Camtasia Studio Editor. You have the option to export it immediately or review it first, which is usually a better idea. As you can with most video editors, you can “scrub” (drag) through the timeline with the green marker arrow to view portions of the video in the preview window (see Figure 6-29).

If you like, you can add a title or transition to the masterpiece but the main point here is probably to export it in a video format that will work for the application you have in mind.

FIGURE 6-29 Camtasia Studio’s video editor opens with the PowerPoint capture project.

We’ll export this as an AVI movie file in a screen resolution that will allow us to use it in a subsequent DVD project in the next chapter. Clicking Produce > Produce video as in the Task List opens the Production Wizard, essentially a step-by-step process that culminates in the rendering of your project in the video file format you selected. Depending upon the complexity and length of the production, this can take minutes or hours. The important panel is the Video Output options (see Figure 6-30). Here, you can choose a full-screen resolution and a codec that will work for your purposes. (For more about codecs, refer to “Understanding Codecs,” in Chapter 5.)

WEB PAGE OUTPUT One of the Camtasia output options is to link it to an HTML web page. To take advantage of this and have the movie stream or play within a web browser, do not use the AVI format; the WMV format will work with the proper scripting in most web browsers, and Camtasia does that authoring for you with this option. We will discuss web output in more detail in Chapter 7.

FIGURE 6-30 Camtasia Studio’s Production Wizard lets you export your movie in a variety
of formats, compression options, and screen resolutions, depending upon its final purpose.

With a Camtasia movie saved to a local folder, you can use it the way you would any other video file. In this case, you could even make a presentation movie inside another presentation (for training purposes). Just go to the Insert > Movies and Sounds > Movie from File command and put the final AVI file into a PowerPoint slide (see Figure 6-31). When you play the slide, you will see the video in a window that you recorded with Camtasia.

WINDOWS MEDIA ENCODER If you don’t want to buy Camtasia, you can achieve some of the same results (without the video in the window) by using another screen capture utility available for free from Microsoft. Windows Media Encoder can also capture all of your PowerPoint presentation at different frame rates along with your builds, transitions, audio narration, and even video (if your system is powerful enough). It is not quite as user-friendly as Camtasia and is limited to creating the WMF video file format only. You can download WME at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx (we will go through an encoder broadcast session “Online Video Solution 1—Broadcasting with Windows Media Encoder” in Chapter 7).

FIGURE 6-31 The final movie file can be used in another PowerPoint presentation just like
any other video, resulting in a presentation within another presentation.

Serious Magic Communicator as a Presentation Broadcast Studio

We discussed creating, editing, and inserting video into PowerPoint in the previous chapter, but it simply involved acquiring video that was already shot and trimming it.

As we saw in the previous section, video can also be captured from a computer screen and combined with a live video in a window to create a new digital video file.

Any of these movies can be shown within PowerPoint, burned to a movie DVD, or posted or streamed on the web (we’ll cover the latter two issues in Chapter 7).

But how do you create really compelling professional-quality video?
 
You can conceivably obtain high-quality camcorders (3-chip), hire a lighting specialist and a sound expert, and go out into the field and shoot your footage.

But if you think about it, most of the professional video you watch is created in a professional broadcast studio. If your business, school, or church has such a facility, you’re in business.

But what if you don’t? Whether it’s to show in PowerPoint, burn to DVD, or post or stream online, you can simulate a full-blown broadcast studio on your desktop by using one of the versions of Serious Magic Communicator.

Unlike a simple video camera, which just shoots whatever is in front of the lens, a production studio lets you combine “live” shots (of people speaking or other video footage) with stills, other video, graphics, and any number of elements (including graphics in PowerPoint).

Again, we can’t completely cover this program here, but you should get an idea of the kind of functionality that is available with a broadcast production tool like this. In Figure 6-32, you can see the basic Visual Communicator interface.

FIGURE 6-32 Serious Magic Visual Communicator gives you a complete video production
facility on your desktop.

Notice that one of the features is the ability to use a virtual set. As I appear in the preview window, I am not in such a fancy studio at all, but rather in the den of a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.

All versions of the program come with a green screen—a large green sheet that you can tape into your “studio” to serve as a backdrop for “virtual” camera shots. Within the V-Screen effect in Communicator, the backdrop becomes transparent in the same way that professional photographers and videographers use the device to put anyone into any background they want. Also included is a high-quality microphone for narration and voiceovers.

The other feature of note here is the teleprompter. This gives the “broadcaster” the ability to write out a complete script, which is integrated on a timeline (on the right) with a series of titles, effects, or graphics.

Figure 6-33 shows one way to insert graphics into the effects panelby copying a slide directly from PowerPoint and pasting it into an effect. You can also import entire PowerPoint presentations to narrate and combine with other video.

FIGURE 6-33 Serious Magic Visual Communicator lets you drag and drop or copy your
PowerPoint slides into a production.
 
With the production assembled in the timeline (or Actions panel on the right), you are ready to rehearse and eventually record, combining the camera footage with the effects in the “Action Trays.” As you can see in Figure 6-34, effects like fades move between footage of the broadcaster and the graphics that need to be displayed.

 
FIGURE 6-34 As you rehearse and record your production in Serious Magic Visual Communicator, you can preview all of the effects and transitions.

The studio accepts other video as well—we can drop the video we previously created with Camtasia directly into an Action Tray, and it will play as a segment in the overall production (see Figure 6-35).

Finally, with the production recorded, it can be published (or exported) as we have seen elsewhere. Visual Communicator’s “Wizard” gives you many of the same options we saw with Camtasia in terms of video formats and applications. The final video can be streamed from the highend version, combined with an HTML (web) page, or simply saved as a Windows video file to use in PowerPoint or to burn to a movie DVD (see Figure 6-36).

There are three different versions of this product (more information is
available at http://www.seriousmagic.com/):

• Visual Communicator 2 Web—$189.95—Output for the Internet or CD
• Visual Communicator 2 Pro—$289.95—Output for broadcast resolution; drag and drop PowerPoint, more templates and effects
• Visual Communicator 2 Studio—$489.95—High-end professional video output including up to three cameras

These versions are also discounted for educational use.

 
FIGURE 6-35 Other video segments input into Serious Magic Visual Communicator play in the proper sequence in the timeline.

FIGURE 6-36 The publishing options in Serious Magic Visual Communicator allow you to create the usual Windows video formats in many different resolutions.

VISUAL COMMUNICATOR AND POWERPOINT Visual Communicator complements PowerPoint in several ways. If your final output is a PowerPoint presentation, VC is a great tool for creating video files to display in your slides, as we covered in Chapter 5.

But as you can see, if your final output is video, VC gives you complete control of all of your graphical elements to create a video file for multiple uses: importing into PowerPoint, broadcasting or streaming, or burning to DVD. In this way it can be a PowerPoint alternative for situations where video is all you need, with the flexibility to reuse your PowerPoint content and any related graphics (in a standard Windows image file format) within the video itself.

You should also be aware that you are not limited to bringing in just one slide at a time into the timeline. You can import an entire presentation at one time and then work with it by interspersing your own graphics and effects, including video of yourself and the underlying narration read from the teleprompter.

Learn more about Tom Bunzel and his book, "Solving the PowerPoint Predicament:  Using Digital Media for Effective Communication", in our Contributor's section.