In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create a video of a slide presentation
in which your voice is recorded along with a full-screen image of your slides.
First, you create your slideshow in PowerPoint or a similar application as you normally would.
And I’m using an example of a Powerpoint presentation that I prepared previously for
a conference, and this is what I’m going to use that in this example.
Then you need to get a screen capture software program such as Quicktime, Screenflow or Camtasia
Studio.
And for this demonstration, I will be using Screenflow.
When you open the application, select file and new recording and you’ll get a dialog
box that looks like this.
And what you want to do is, first of all it’s going to record your desktop from your color
LCD.
And then if you want to record your own image as you are giving your presentation, you select
this first box, and it’s going to open up the camera on your computer.
And in my case, it’s the FaceTime HD Camera.
Then if you want to record the audio from a different microphone from than what is built
in to your computer, then select the external microphone that you prefer.
And then you can see that I’ve got this hooked up to my external microphone, and it’s
picking up my voice on that external microphone.
And then all you do is tap the record button and you will be given a 5 second countdown,
and then it will start recording.
And now what you want to do is open up your Powerpoint file and begin your slide show.
And so now I’m in my slide show and what I would be doing is going through each slide,
step by step, and talking about what I want to say about each one.
And so this is the title slide and the next one is the first slide of my presentation.
The screen capture recording will g record animations that appear on your screen as I’m
showing here.
And as I go through my presentation, all of those screens and animations will be recorded
along with my voice explaining my presentation.
And then when you finish, all you do is tap “stop record”, and the recording will
stop, and your file will automatically open up in Screenflow.
OK, so now we are in Screenflow, and what you see are two windows.
The upper window here is the viewer window, and you can see the file that was recorded.
And in the lower window, this is the timeline, and you can see the two recordings that were
taken simultaneous.
The one on top here is the file that was recorded by the FaceTime HD camera on my computer,
and the second one is the recording of my computer screen.
Let’s play a little bit of it so you can see what this looks like in the viewer window.
[playing the recording]
OK, so you can see what has happened here.
The program has put the upper recording of my image into a picture in picture window.
And what you can do is you can resize this window.
Now to constrain the scale, you want to hold down the shift key when you are dragging these
corners, so that the proportions are retained.
And so you can make that window showing your image as large or as small as you want.
And that’s going to depend on your particular situation and preferences.
So I’m going to leave it at about that size.
And so if we go forward….
[playing the recording]
You can see…how your presentation is going to look and whether you even want this window
showing your image in here at all.
Some people find this distracting to have the speaker showing.
You can also choose to show this image of yourself just at intervals or you can switch
back and forth between your computer screen and your presentation slide and the image
of yourself.
It just depends on how you want to set this up and how you want it to play.
OK, what you next want to do is to trim your footage in the timeline window so that it
cuts out any extraneous footage.
And to do this you want to select both of these files by holding down the shift key
and tapping on both of them.
Now what you can do- you’ll see that when I move the cursor over, it changes and now
what you want to do is…move the playhead to the point in your presentation where your
presentation actually starts.
Because this first part shows your desktop, which you don’t want to show.
So let’s say you want to start your presentation right at the beginning at this point, and
so now what you want to do is trim your clip to that point.
And you want to go down and do this at the end of your presentation…
down here.
And you want to cut out all that stuff at the end that comes after your presentation.
And so we’ll find where the end of that presentation was and we’ll trim the other
end of that clip.
And then you can move this back to the beginning and reposition your playhead and so now your
presentation is going play from the beginning and you’re not going to have all of that
extraneous footage.
Now the other thing you that can do, which is quite useful, is you can use the tools
over here to edit your footage.
And, for example, let’s look at the picture in picture window here showing my image.
What I can do is I can select the video option, the video properties.
And I can scale that image here.
I can change the opacity if I want to.
I can change the brightness if it’s too dark or if it’s too light.
I can change the saturation.. whatever needs to be done to modify that image so that it
appears the way you want it.
similarly you can do some editing of the audio properties; you can do some editing of the
screen recording properties.
You can add callouts.
Now you can only do this actually to your screen recording.
You can add callouts, you can add annotations, you can add text boxes, and you can add additional
media such as music.
So once you have everything the way you want it, then you want to save your file and prepare
it for publishing.
To do that, you go to file, and you see that you can publish it directly to YouTube or
Vimeo or other sites or you can export it as a movie file.
And here you can select the export format depending on where it’s going to end up…the
web, iPad, iPhone, whatever.
I usually rescale mine to 100%.
And then all you do is tap export, and that file will be exported with a .mov file extension
on it.
You can customize the settings.
I usually export it as H.264.
You want to make sure the sound is selected, and for now I’m going to leave all of the
settings on their default position.
And I’m going to export this.
And now it’s exporting.
Now that file is exported.
Let’s minimize that window.
And here is the movie file over here on my desktop.
And we’ll open it up.
And here you can see that movie, and it will play and all of the slides are there as well
as my embedded image.
So this is a great way to create videos of your conference presentations or seminars
to post perhaps on your website or you might want to send them to someone.
You can also create lessons to augment a course you are teaching.
You can record class lectures for students to review your lectures as many times as they
wish.
There are lots of possibilities.
Virtually anything that you can show on your computer screen can be captured this way and
published as a video.
I hope you found this tutorial informative and that it has given you some ideas for creating
videos to show off your work.