Powerpoint Presentations as Enhanced Podcasts

[JonBischke]

I've been playing around a bit with the idea of being able to convert a Powerpoint presentation into an enhanced podcast. There's an easy feature in Powerpoint that allows you to record narration along with the presentation and records the slide transitions and timings. It would seem that this would be a perfect way to create an enhanced podcast (where the slides could show up on an iPod timed to match the audio) with not a lot of additional work. A couple of questions regarding this:

1. One of the challenges is that the file is saved as a .ppt file and I'm not sure if there's a way to convert this into an enhanced podcast. Otherwise I'm not sure how it could work.

2. Could Powerpoint slides even be displayed on a color iPod? I haven't seen this but can't imagine why it wouldn't work.

Has anyone tried this or does anyone have any additional information about how something like this could work?

[podcastshuffle]

Has anyone tried this or does anyone have any additional information about how something like this could work?

iPods won't display a PPT as far as I know. I think there are some WinCE PDAs that will. Why not just create a movie? iTunes will play QuickTime files and more likely than not there will be future iPod that will play movies.

I made a couple easy "slide shows" for a wedding web site in iPhoto. Just use the export as QT feature. In your case, you don't have to use photos, just import all your slides as JPEGs into iPhoto and then export it as a QT with whatever music you want.

Jeff

[JonBischke]

That's a cool idea (using QuickTime). Here's a bit more about what I'm looking for though so you can see why the Powerpoint is so appealing for me. I wanted to be able to take a lecture and set it up such that a person can be up in front of the room speaking and using Powerpoint and when they are done being recorded, the timing for their slide transitions are somehow embedding into the recording. The end goal is to have a presentation such that someone can "view" it on an iPod or other portable device while at the same time they are hearing audio with timing that matches the slide show.

I realize that this might be a bit down the road in terms of technology but wanted to get opinions as to where we are right now as far as being able to do this and where we might be in a few months.

[NickD]

I am going to be giving a presentation to some colleges that way. I think what I may end up doing is just doing a screen capture on each slide.

I tried for a while to figure out how to make the stage (or slide, or whatever it is called in Power Point) with a square aspect ratio, but could not figure it out. So I just made the graphics in the master slide adhere to a square ratio.

Exporting the PPT as HTML is really stupid because the files are so huge. Even if you were to imbed the audio into each slide as a separate MP3 file, and enhanced podcast is much more portable (one file) and smaller file size.

If you could come up with a program that will export each slide as a jpg or gif or png, and allow each one to have a time stamp, and imbedded everything using ChapterTool, that would kick ***. I'll beta test for you.

[justSue]

In PowerPoint, you can make the slides square in your File>Page Setup options. Just select "Custom" for the size and indicate equal width and height. You'll have to do some math to figure out how the inches x inches will translate into your px x px. Best to make it small, then test (like 3" x 3")

Once you're finished, you can split each slide into a seperate file, then save as jpeg.

But... if you're going to all that trouble just to go from PPT to jpeg, you might as well use something like Macromedia Fireworks which is pretty friendly when copying and pasting from PPT, and create a single file with multiple Frames in there. Then export each frame as a jpeg in a batch export.

[NickD]

Sweet, that work! Thanks justSue!

[justSue]

Cool!!

If you're going to be doing this on a regular basis, you might want to look at Macromedia Captivate (no I don't work for Macromedia, I'm just a huge fan that uses a lot of their junk)

Captivate lets you create PowerPoint-like presentations, and you have the option of saving in many different formats - .swf, .exe, exporting slides as graphics.. The indended use of this product is for presentations and web-based training, but its really flexible and also allows narration, video, and background audio. So, aside from your podcast project, you can use it in the real-world as a replacement for PPT! :)