The Smart Easy Road From PowerPoint To YouTube

There is no denying the overwhelming supremacy of YouTube in the online video community. Reports such as this one suggest that YouTube is also a popular search engine (figures for US search engine rankings), having had 3.7 billion search queries in March 2010 as against Google’s 10.5 billion. YouTube came next to Google, and ahead of Yahoo, Bing and others.

This stat will alone suffice to understand the rush to enlist video in YouTube. Of late the video quality has also improved a great deal. YouTube now shows the videos with a new sleek video player that lets you select the resolution of the video you’re watching. The usual options are 360p and 480p, and in some cases 720p and even 1080p when the uploaded video has high res.

However, dry stats are one thing, ease of use is another. In this video you get to see an easy, convenient route from PowerPoint to YouTube.

PowerPoint To YouTube – Your Options

Depending upon your need, you have both free and paid options to cover the distance between PowerPoint and YouTube. There is of course the intermediate step of converting PowerPoint to video that is acceptable to YouTube, and this is where the main action is.

Once you have made a video from PowerPoint, it’s no big deal to upload to YouTube. The following image shows the video formats accepted by YouTube.

Video formats accepted by YouTube

Let’s first check out some free options other than the one I’m going to show in the video below:

1. Save the PowerPoint presentation to video in WMV. This is now easily possible with PowerPoint 2010. See the image below. YouTube accepts WMV. Upload your video to YouTube. I said ‘free option’. There is a reason. Download PowerPoint 2010 Beta free and create presentations and videos to your heart’s content.

    

   

   PowerPoint being converted to video

    

   A big reason why this option is preferable is that the WMV video captures all the intricate animations and transitions that you do in PowerPoint presentation.

 

2. authorSTREAM offers free conversion of PowerPoint presentation to MP4 video format. The final video however shall not be more than 5 minutes long. If your video exceeds 5 minutes, you need to buy video credits starting from just $2 to get your job done.

    

   If you have things like transitions, animations, and external video clips in your presentation, it will be a good idea to first try out the free option with authorSTREAM to see how the final video has shaped up.

There are quite a few paid software that do reasonably good conversion of PowerPoint to video. Unfortunately, in my experience, the after-sales-service of some of these software makers is not up to the mark.

PowerPoint To YouTube Via Windows Movie Maker

This is a simple way of making animated video with the help of images. In fact you may say you don’t need PowerPoint at all to make this video. But you need PowerPoint because it helps you make attractive slides, which you can then save as images for use with Windows Movie Maker.

If you’re interested, watch the tutorial video below that explains the steps to make the video that you can upload to YouTube. I’ve also described the steps below after the video.

The steps to make animated video with Windows Movie Maker (WMM) from PowerPoint slides are as under:

1. Save the PowerPoint slide – And Now Comes The Video! – as a JPEG image file with dimension 640×480 pixels.

 

2. Open the image file in MS Paint that comes free with the Windows OS.

 

3. From this image, make 4 more image files. You now have 5 image files. For convenience name them 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Image 1 has only the word And. Image 2 has the words And Now; image 3 has And Now Comes; image 4 has And Now Comes The; finally image 5 has all the 5 words.

 

4. Open Windows Movie Maker. The first thing to do is to go to Tools > Options > Advanced, and then make the Picture duration 1 second and Transition duration 0.50 seconds.

 

5. The 5 images are now brought on to the timeline and put chronologically one after another.

 

6. To create simple fade-in transition, push the second image over the first one for 0.50 seconds. The third image is now similarly pushed over the second one, followed by the fourth image over the third, and finally the fifth over the fourth image.

 

7. Click the play button to see how it has come. Splendid! It looks as if the video is made in PowerPoint itself. Don’t you think?

 

8. The last 2 steps will be to convert the whole thing to WMV video, and then upload it to YouTube.

The image files are made to 1 second long in the above example. But you can easily make to them to any length of time by changing Picture duration. Alternatively, drag the edge of the image to your desired length. Remember this technique of lengthening or shortening is possible only with still image because there is no change in its composition with time.

If you have any other way to convert PowerPoint to YouTube free, feel welcome to share your experience in the comment box below.