PowerPoint To Video Is A Lot Easier Than You Think

People find PowerPoint unique for a variety of reasons. One of them will surely be that it is popular among users of widest skill-sets.

Thus a Standard-VI student is as effortlessly creating a slideshow for her school assignment as an experienced professional, busy executing a stunning PowerPoint to video project.

PowerPoint 2010 is bundled with more features than its immediate predecessor. It’s in beta and available free for doing experiments as one pleases. If you like dabbling in things like presentations and slideshows, you shouldn’t let go this opportunity.

Since web video is fast emerging as a means to attain and retain viewership, it is but inevitable that PowerPoint becomes one of the most preferred to make videos for web.

True, presenters use PowerPoint to slowly move from slide to slide in tandem with the accompanying narration. But, as many of you know, PowerPoint is much, much more power-packed than simply making a halting slideshow.

Some of the basic features that I think are very useful in making PowerPoint to video are as below:

1. It helps you create an enchanting array of animations

 

2. It helps you fix the exact time you want a slide or an effect to last before the next one comes in

 

3. It allows you to embed external video and audio clips as part of presentation

To this list let me add the lovely ‘transitions’ that you may insert between slides as in PowerPoint 2010 beta.

These are not difficult to implement even if you haven’t used PowerPoint much. However, the creative skill comes to play when you combine these features to produce stunning effects.

For the first time in the 2010 beta edition there is the opportunity to convert a presentation cum slideshow to a video in WMV format (see the image below).

You can play an embedded WMV video in your website with Microsoft Silverlight using the JW Silverlight Player for example. You can also upload the WMV video to YouTube though the preferred format there is the H.264 encoded MP4 container.

The video below shows how some photographs can be grouped together from PowerPoint to video to make an engaging auto-presentation. Here the PowerPoint presentation is converted to MP4 flash video and controlled by a flash video player with play/stop/pause button and an option to scale the volume. The stunning photos are sourced from the collections of Alaskan Dude at Flickr (under Creative Commons).