Convert PowerPoint To Flash With Screen Capture Video Using Jing

If you are a PowerPoint animation maker, you may have often wondered how to embed a PowerPoint video on to your website. You could think of various options, but perhaps none is as simple as Jing, the tool for screen capture video from TechSmith Corporation of Camtasia Studio fame.

I’ll come to the subject of converting PowerPoint to flash, but before that let’s take a brief overview of Jing.

Knowing Jing

Jing has both free and Pro versions. If you haven’t used Jing in the past, it’s a good idea to try the free version first and explore it well before opting for the Pro version which comes for an annual fee of just under $15 presently.

Jing is a great tool, yet using it may prove a little daunting for the starters. There are a few reasons for that.

1. Jing currently needs Microsoft .NET (dot NET) Framework 3.5 SP 1 (Service Pack 1) or higher installed in your computer. When you attempt to use Jing for the first time, you’ll be asked if you have the .NET framework installed. If not, you’ll be prompted to download it from the Microsoft site and install it before you can use Jing.
2. The second factor that according to me weighs a bit against Jing is the managing of audio for the screen capture video. Jing captures whatever is there on the computer screen, but you need to enable the audio recording on the toolbar in order to capture the audio as well. The best way – as Jing suggests – to record audio is though a USB microphone, and also, if necessary, check the audio input level of your computer.

    

   Can you record system audio? Jing says you can. To know more, check out the audio FAQs at the Jing Learning Center.

3. The free version of Jing doesn’t permit editing. It simply converts the screen capture video (plus audio if available) to an SWF flash file along with play/pause/stop controls. The video above (with an earlier version of Jing) I’ve made shows how the free version can be used to do that.

    

   Contrast this with the Pro version where you not only get the recording in the enhanced format MP4, but you also can edit the recording in TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio. PowerPoint 2010 too allows embedding of MP4 video though I haven’t tried the MPEG-4 AVC format that Jing gives in output.

4. The free version of Jing has another lacunae. Unlike the MP4 file of the Pro version, the SWF file from the free version cannot be uploaded to YouTube. SWF is not embeddable in PowerPoint as well.

How Is Free Jing Helpful?

Despite some disadvantages, the free version of Jing can really be helpful for sporadic video makers. Some reasons are explained below:

1. Any portion of the computer screen can be recorded. Thus it is possible to narrow down the yellow cross-haired lines to record a non-standard area of say 497×373 pixels as I’ve shown in the above video.
2. For those who wish to convert PowerPoint to flash movie, Jing is a good option indeed. The good thing is that the SWF flash movie generated by Jing has the built-in controls that make it possible to start, pause, or stop the video.
3. The flash movie can be easily embedded in any webpage with the help of simple HTML code. Thus, embedding a PowerPoint video – that itself can have video embedded from YouTube – in any webpage is no longer difficult to do.
4. Finally, the screen recording quality turns out as really good. This is expected because of the screen capture technology mastered by TechSmith, the makers of both Jing and Camtasia Studio. Also, the recording is lightweight, which means the video takes less time to start streaming on a webpage.

To put it in a nutshell, if you make screen capture video often, and want a ready solution to convert PowerPoint to flash movie, you may need to look at Jing.