Reducing the Dimensions of Your Presentation

If you’ve followed the chapter thus far, you have probably already successfully made your first recording of a PowerPoint presentation. If you’ve actually produced it in a shareable format (or previewed it in Camtasia Player), you may have noticed one disconcerting thing: the SIZE. You were probably recording a full-screen presentation at your monitor’s standard resolution. This leads to a rather large video window that is unwieldy both in terms of file size and interface (the navigational controls could be obstructed, you may need scroll bars to view all the content, etc.). Clearly, this needs to be addressed. We have two options for doing so:

• Reduce your monitor’s resolution. By reducing the resolution of your monitor to 800 x 600, or even 640 x 480, you can still do a full-screen capture, but the resulting file will consume less file space and be more likely to fit on the user’s monitor when viewed. This can be done either globally (within Windows) or from within PowerPoint (and will return to your standard resolution when the presentation concludes).

• Record your presentation in a window^[*]. This has the advantage of allowing you to resize your presentation to pretty much any dimensions you want (and PowerPoint scales the slides’ text and images remarkably well, even at smaller dimensions). The one disadvantage is that you cannot use any of the pointer options (such as pens and highlights) during your slide show.

Reducing Your Screen Resolution

You can reduce your monitor’s resolution globally by following the instructions in Appendix A, under the section called “Keep Your Dimensions Small.”

To reduce the resolution within PowerPoint, follow these instructions:

1. In PowerPoint, choose Set up Show… from the Slide Show menu.

2. In the Performance section, choose a new resolution from the Slide show resolution drop-down list, preferably 640 x 480 if the presentation still looks good.

3. Click OK. Click Record to capture your presentation as usual. The screen will probably go black at the beginning of the presentation as the system changes the screen resolution. Once finished, the screen will go blank again while Windows changes the resolution back to what it was previously.

Caution 

Since changing the resolution on the fly like this usually takes a few seconds, you may end up inadvertently recording a couple seconds of your presentation’s Normal view at the beginning and/or end of your capture. You can easily edit out these portions later in Camtasia Studio.

Recording Your Presentation in a Window

To set up PowerPoint to play your slide show in a window, please do the following:

1. In PowerPoint, choose Set up Show… from the Slide Show menu.

2. In the Show Type section, click the Browsed by an individual (window) radio button. Make sure that the Show scrollbar button is unchecked. Click OK.

3. Before you start recording, let’s look at our presentation in Slide Show view so that we can adjust the size of the window to our liking. Click the Slide Show button ( ), located in the lower left-hand corner of the application window.

4. Your presentation appears in a window. You may need to take it out of maximized mode. Click the Restore button ( ) in the upper right-hand corner of the screen in order to resize the window.

5. Resize by clicking and dragging on the lower right-hand corner of the window. Try to resize your window with the same aspect ratio as full screen, or your recording will have black bars appearing either at the top and bottom or at the sides of your video window.

   Tip 

   If you’re trying to attain a particular set of screen dimensions, it’ll probably take a few tries to get the window to just the right size. After resizing my presentation, I use TechSmith SnagIt (a demo version of which is on the companion CD) to make a screenshot of the presentation window. In SnagIt’s Preview window, the dimensions of the window will be listed in the status bar. I then adjust the window accordingly and take another screenshot, and so on and so on. To summarize: Resize your window, measure, repeat as often as necessary.

6. Click the Record button. A blinking recording frame will appear around your window.

   Note that clicking on the screen to advance the slide does not work when showing your slide show in a window. Use the PageUp/PageDn or the Left/Right arrow keys instead.

7. You can pause and stop the recording per usual.

^[*]This option is only available for PowerPoint XP and later. If you have PowerPoint 2000, then you must reduce your monitor resolution in order to capture your video at smaller dimensions.