Chapter 9. Using Video in Presentations

 < Day Day Up > 

Incorporating video into presentations is the great grassroots business use of video not quite as sexy as DVD or as hip as streaming, but the bread and butter of road warriors around the globe. In this chapter, we describe how to insert video into PowerPoint (for Windows and Mac) and Apple Keynote.

As you would expect, each program has its own peculiarities. There are also red flags to be aware of, especially if I've been creating a presentation on one computer and playing it from another.

Let's start with Keynote: you can embed the video file into the presentation itself, so wherever the presentation goes, the video file goes. This makes it simple to create a presentation on one computer and display it on another.

In contrast, you can't embed video files into PowerPoint. The PowerPoint project files may stay smaller, but also complicates transferring your presentation to a different computer. Not only must you transfer the video file(s) to the target computer, but they also must reside in the exact same folder on that computer.

To make things as easy as possible, I create all presentations in a drive called c:\apresent on my video workstation in the lab, and copy all video files into that folder before linking them inside PowerPoint. Then, I transfer the files to a similarly named subdirectory on my laptop.

Why c:\apresent instead of just c:\present? Because the odds are that during the presentation I'll have to find the folder to locate a demo file or two, and if I use c:\apresent, the folder will generally fall at the top of the list in Windows Explorer, and therefore be easier to find.

My other prepresentation essential is to create a desktop shortcut to the PowerPoint or Keynote file itself. This way, if either program crashes quite likely since I've usually got multiple video players and two or three authoring, editing, or encoding programs open at the same time it takes just one click to get it started again.

Finally, if your presentation is displayed on a projector, test its performance on the same projector beforehand if possible. If you can't, remember that most projectors are still limited to 1,024x768 or even 800x600 resolution, and projects developed on 1,280x1024 and especially 1,920x1,200 will look vastly different at these lower resolutions.

     < Day Day Up > 


    DV 101. A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government & Educators
    DV 101: A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government and Educators
    ISBN: 0321348974
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 110
    Authors: Jan Ozer

    flylib.com © 2008-2017.
    If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net