To make video from PowerPoint™, here's the drill. You have basically two ways to go - quick and dirty, or slow and messy.
Option 1
The easiest way is to find a laptop or other computer with NTSC out. Just hook it up to a VTR or DVD recorder, hit record, and sequence thru the slides. This is your best option if you want to capture PowerPoint animations or transitions.
Unfortunately color fidelity and sharpness from NTSC-out terminals is not always the best. On some units it's great, others have problems. (It works better with S-video). You'll want to experiment with your TV-out driver settings to get the bext picture. Most provide controls for contrast, brightness, sharpness, interlace flicker reduction and even frame size. You may need to reformat the slides to compensate for TV safe cutoff. Click here for a gif image you can copy and paste into the PowerPoint master slide to show you the zones. With the TV-out active, you can preview exactly what it will look like before committing to tape.
An upgrade to this option would be to use an industrial-strength scan converter that would take your VGA output and convert it to video. Just record and there you go.
Option 2
The other way is more difficult, but produces images of much higher quality. You have to be using PowerPoint XP or newer for this to work properly. Earlier versions of PowerPoint do not anti-alias fonts on export. (The following applies to 4x3 SD video. Things are a little different for HD and HDV. See below for HD tips.)
Step 1 Fix Problems:
First, fix TV safe problems and tiny fonts (see above). If the PowerPoint uses any text or graphic "builds", you have to duplicate the slides and delete objects so you have one slide per step. And of course any transitions or animation effects will be lost in this process. You can recreate some transitions in editing, but you won't be able to reproduce text animations without a lot of DVE work. Another "fix" you may need to apply is to fatten up any tiny lines. Really thin lines will jitter when brought into an interlacing environment. You can fix those by adding a little blur in step 4.
Step 2 Export:
Once you've prepared the file, go to File|Save As. In the "file type" drop down, choose BMP or TIF (For SD you're going to run these thru Photoshop later, so choose something your system will like), give it a file name, then click "Save". You'll be asked if you want to save just the current slide or all slides. Say "All". A new folder with the name you typed will be created and all the slides will be in it. All the slides will be named "slide1.bmp, slide2.bmp, etc." With no leading zeros and everything ending in a number, this is a problem because some NLEs will think they're a frame sequence and import the whole thing as a clip with one slide per page. So the next step is...
Step 3: Stretch for SD video:
As you'll read in A Short Version of the Long History of Television, all SD video (and HDV video) uses rectangular pixels. Some NLEs will stretch square pixel stills correctly and work fine. Others will either not stretch, or will not play unstretched stills in real time. Test your NLE to see if it will accept square pixle graphics, and if it doesn't here's what to do: Using a bitmap editor like Adobe Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint. Create a batch filter that will resize from the native PowerPoint export size to 720x480 for NTSC DV (or 720x486 for NTSC D1). Then execute a batch command to convert the entire folder of slides. If your layout has tiny lines, add a bit of blur to the batch filter. (Read the HD Pointers if you're using HDV.)
Step 4 Rename (Optional):
Some NLEs think that when you import a batch of clips with the same name but different numbers, it's a "frame sequence," and will treat them as one clip with one slide per frame. That's great if you want a quick show, but it won't work for normal editing. Before proceeding, test this on your NLE. If you dump in a bunch of slides and all you see is one clip, you need to rename them by adding an alpha character after the number. You can do that en masse by using a DOS command. Details on that are at the bottom of this page. NOW you're ready to import the slides into your NLE and edit! I told you it was more difficult, but the picture quality is much better.
HD POINTERS
A number of complicating factors enter when you want to transfer PowerPoint to HD:
Creating is Easy:
HD video is 16x9 widescreen, so it's best to create the PowerPoint in a 16x9 format. If you use the correct page sizes, you will get the exact square pixel HD format your NLE requires:
- For 720p (1280x720) set your page size to 13.34x7.5 inches.
- For 1080i (1920x1080) set your page size to 20x11.25 inches
- For HDV (1440x1080), IF YOUR SLIDES ARE PHOTOS ONLY start with the 1080i page size, but just before you save as, set your page size to 15x11.25 inches. This will squeeze the image down to the correct 1440x1080 size. Because PowerPoint will NOT squeeze text or vector graphics, you cannot use this trick if your slides contain those elements. To get real-time HDV graphics with text, export 1080i then use the batch process in step 3 above to squeeze the slides to 1440x1080.
Converting is a Problem:
If your slide show is 4x3, converting to 16x9 presents a problem. Stretching a 4x3 slide to 16x9 using page size will stretch photos but not text or graphics. Stretching 4x3 to 16x9 in Photoshop stretches everything, but the stretch will make everything look fat. So here is a recommended work flow to create pillarboxed (bars on the sides) slides in 16x9.
- Open your existing show and change the size for default "onscreen show" (10x7.5) if your output will be 720p, or 15x11.25 if your output will be 1080i or HDV.
- Use Save As to export all the slides as bitmaps.
- Create a new, blank PowerPoint show with the page size for your appropriate HD destination (see "Creating," above)
- Add a background to the master for the "pillarbox" columns
- Manually place the bitmaps you created in Step 2 into slides in the new show (you can't use Photo Gallery in a widescreen template) .
- Use Save As to create the HD slides, ready for import into your NLE. (NOTE: For HDV, you CAN use the page size trick, since all images are "photos".)
I hope you find this article of value. Please let us know how it works!
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HOW TO RENAME FILES
I usually manually rename the first 9 slides with a leading 0 (slide01.bmp) in the explorer window, then I'll create a new folder for the 100s and put everything above 99 in that folder. Then I revert to DOS. Open a command window (start | run and type "cmd"). Using dos commands (if you've never used them before, see below) navigate to the folder with the files, then issue the rename command thusly: "ren slide??.bmp<space>slide??a.bmp". The "a" at the end can be any alpha character, but it's needed to tell Razor that this is not a frame in a frame sequence, but is instead a video still. Do the same thing in the 100s folder but with 3 ???s. (NOTE: If you're using a PVR, rename them "slide??a001.bmp" - the ending number clues the PVR to make it a PVD file in the next step. ALSO NOTE: You can change the "slide" to any 5 alpha characters - even something like "aaaaa??a.bmp". It needs to be a 5 character name to keep the rename command from getting confused. )
RELAVENT DOS COMMANDS:
Note: DOS commands must be run on the local machine. You cannot run a DOS command on a shared network drive. However you can run DOS commands on a remote machine using Remote Desktop Connection or Terminal Services.
TO OPEN A DOS WINDOW:
Either search for the Command Prompt icon in Programs or click Start | Run and type "cmd" ("command" in w9x)
Key:
< ret > = hit the enter or "return" key
< space > = one hit of the spacebar Characters to type are in brackets (don't type the brackets)
Change drive: [D:< ret >] Type a drive letter (d) and a colon (:) and hit return.
Change Directory: [cd< space >type_folder_name< ret >]
cd is the Change Directory command, a space, and "folder" is whatever the folder name is (type in the proper name). If the folder you need to get to is nested beneath another folder, you'll have to do it again, like [cd slides]. Your dos prompt should then say "d:\folder\slides >" If it's even another folder deep, you might have to do something like [cd 100s], in which case you'd be in d:\folder\slides\100s. (If you're brave you can enter the whole path at once, like [cd folder\slides\100s ], but if you're new to DOS, it's easier to do it one at a time.)
Directory command: [dir< ret >]. This will give you the listing of the current folder, so you can check that you're where you want to be.
Rename command: [ren<space>type_oldname<space>type_newname<ret>]
Renaming PowerPoint files requires that you use wild card characters - see below for examples.
Wild card characters: [?] and [*]
A Question mark [?] replaces one character in that space
if you have a series of files that end in a single number, [ren filename?.bmp filename?a.bmp] renames filename1-9 to add an "a" after the number.
Use multiple ??s if there are 2 or 3 digit numbers, e.g. [ren filename??.bmp filename??a.bmp] for filename 10-99 Asterisk [*] replaces any characters after it
([dir *.bmp] - shows all bmp files, [dir filename*.*], shows all files beginning with "filename")
Going Back a Folder Level: [cd< space >..< ret >]
That's the Change Directory command, a space, and two periods. That will take you up a level.
To close the command window: [exit< ret >]
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