There are many third-party products available on the market, which can be used to capture your slide shows and convert them to video files.
Some of the more interesting ones include Office FX, CamTasia, HyperCam, ScreenCam, and PPT2DVD. Mac users can use products such as Screenography and Snapz Pro.
After creating a video file, you can write a DVD using your favorite DVD burning software such as Nero Vision Express, and create a DVD.
Let’s use one of these products and convert a PowerPoint presentation to a DVD. We will use Camtasia to capture the slide show.
A DVDs runs at a resolution of 720x480 pixels, which is different from the standard resolutions available normally on personal computer. To optimize the visual quality we must set your computer desktop resolution to 800x600, which is the nearest match to DVD full resolution.
To set your computer desktop resolution, right-click on your desktop and select Properties option from the popup menu that appears. On the Display Properties window, click the Settings tab and set the screen area to 800x600 pixels. Set the Colors to True Color (32 bit) option.
You can now continue with the process to convert your slide show to video file. Open your slide show (.ppt) file using PowerPoint and test your PowerPoint presentation before recording.
1. Start the Camtasia Studio. The Camtasia studio and Camtasia Recorder window will appear.
2. Click Tools in the Camtasia Recorder window and select Options menu item. The Tools Options window will appear.
3. Select the "Save as AVI" option under File options group. The Camtasia toolbar will also appear in the PowerPoint window.
4. Click on the Record button on the Camtasia toolbar to start the recording of the presentation.
5. Move on to your slide show. Camtasia will record the slide show as it appears on the screen. You can also click the Record Audio tool (which is the second option after Record on the Camtasia toolbar) to record your voice-over with the presentation.
6. Press at the end of the slide show to end the recording. The Camtasia Recorder Preview window will appear allowing you to view view the recoding just completed.
7. Click Save on the Camtesia Recorder Preview to save the Camtesia recording as an .avi file.
You have now successfully created a video file from your PowerPoint presentation. You are now ready to write the video file to a DVD.
Simply import your video file to your preferred DVD burning software and burn it to a DVD.
When creating presentations for DVD, try to use bigger fonts than normal and try to put content in the middle of the slide because corners may not be properly visible on some TV sets.
For best results on TV sets:
a) Give preference to the use of thick lines, dark backgrounds and light color text.
b) Avoid using reds.
To Summarize
PowerPont presentations cannot be directly converted to a DVD.
You need third-party products to convert a slide show into a video file.
You can then use the video file to write the DVD using any standard DVD-burning application.
