The first thing you need to do is to capture the PowerPoint presentation.
Most PowerPoint presentations have transitions and animations. To maintain such animations on the video, you will have to use a product to grab the slideshow and save it to a video file. One such product could be Techsmith Camtasia.
When using Camtasia to record your slideshow, you will obtain a video file format in .AVI. Since .AVI creates very large files, you may want to later convert the video file into other formats, something you can do with Camtasia Producer or many other tools.
To get the best results from Camtasia while grabbing your slideshow, it is a good idea to optimize your computer:
- Close all software you are currently using, Antivirus included.
- Don't forget that better quality corresponds to slower speed as well as bigger file sizes. If you choose the best quality things will slow down.
Steps to follow to capture your PowerPoint slideshow:
- Start PowerPoint.
Open your presentation. It is important to have a totally blank first and last slide, anyway a slide with no content.
- Go to your first slide and select the "slideshow" menu, choose "Slide Transition", tick "On mouse click".
This will make the first slide pause before you start capturing the slideshow.
- Save your presentation. "File" > "Save"
- Select the "File" menu, choose "Save As...."
Change the "Save as type" to "powerpoint show (.pps)". Click "Save". This way your PC will be not overloaded while capturing the slideshow.
Close PowerPoint.
- Start Camtasia Recorder. Check that it is set to record the "screen" by selecting the "Capture" menu, choose "Input" and select "Screen".
- Click "Tools", "Options", click the "AVI" tab along the top.
- Turn off "Auto Configure". Set the frames/sec to 10.0
- Click "Video Setup". Untick "Key Frame Every 80 frames". Click OK.
- Click the "Program" tab, Then tick "Boost priority during capture". Click OK.
- Double click your PowerPoint file to run the presentation.
- The first slide will be displayed until you press a key to move to the next slide.
- Press F9 to start recording the slideshow. Use the space bar to start the slideshow.
- In case your presentation is set to wait for a mouse click to move through each slide, before moving to the next slide. To help you gauge the appropriate time, pre-read the slide out aloud and you should have a pretty close idea of how much time that slide should stay on.
- Press F10 to stop the recording. At this point, you will be prompted to save the presentation you have just captured. Select a directory and filename and save the recording.
- Click "Save". Camtasia will save your captured presentation as an .AVI file.
Continue to Part II
Some of the content in this article has been excerpted from "Tutorial about how to convert powerpoint to dvd" by Taj Simmons
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Taj Simmons is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. He runs the Awesomebackgrounds.com website which deals with PowerPoint backgrounds, free PowerPoint templates, tutorials, hints and tips.
