Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Since I live in L.A., I sometimes get calls from "producer friends;" one such call started me on a project.

This client works for a nonprofit, and although he worked with several post video houses, no one could tell him how to get a PowerPoint slide show onto DVD.

I agreed to talk to his production assistants, and one of them was a Mac lady who had apparently called a bunch of video producers and asked how she could get a PowerPoint file into Quicktime format.

This was amazing to me, since I had written an entire update on this issue based on the premise that what has been available on the Mac is now possible on Windows, thanks to Camtasia Studio.

The bottom line was that the Mac has a Make Movie feature under its File menu in PowerPoint that exports the slide show as... Quicktime. That means if you animate a chart for example, you get it as a Quicktime movie.

They were very grateful for this information but still needed a chart animated in Quicktime (they were not PowerPoint experts) and output for a DVD project.

In terms of creating the DVD, any standard movie format will work in most DVD production studios as we noted in another update on the subject.

But what are the realities of getting an animated chart into this format? Let's examine some of the key steps.

First you want to get the chart looking as crisp and clear in PowerPoint as you can; this may mean revising a custom color scheme and applying it to the presentation with differentiated colors for the pie slices.

You can also try to apply different design templates, but I preferred a clean white background.

Notice that I also made sure the legend was on the bottom of the slide to give it the most space and used the SHIFT plus dragged out the corner of the chart to give it the maximum area.

I also used Align and Distribute to the entire slide to center the chart and title perfectly.

Figure 987

In the Chart Options I also decided to show the data labels within the chart; I made sure to drag them into the slices and changed their font colors to make them stand out more.

Figure 988

You need to be in the MS Graph program and select the item within the chart or the drop down menu, in this case one of the data label, and then reformat each one individually if you want to make them stand out.

Now in Custom Animation, I chose a Fade entrance effect and made sure that in Effect Options I chose to make each slice enter individually by choosing by Category for the Chart animation.

Figure 989

I was almost ready for Camtasia and to present, but I wanted it to look as little like PowerPoint as possible. So in Tools > Options > View tab I turned off the Popup toolbar and to End slide with a black screen.

Figure 990

Now I was ready to go. I opened the Camtasia toolbar but turned off the video option for video in a window.

Clicking Record I was able to make the pie chart appear with down arrow keyboard commands and not show a cursor off screen.

(Yes, I could have used some advanced animation techniques to make it fade-in automatically, but I didn't think the project required that kind of precision.)

Instead I recorded the slide show in real time in Camtasia and then opened the Production output options and chose Quicktime.

Figure 991

For my output I chose non-compressed at 720 x 480 (DVD screen size), 29.97 frames per second, and no audio.

Figure 992

Among the options I also moved the slider for Best Quality video output.

Figure 993

This final result is a Quicktime video file that shows the PowerPoint entrance effects as it reveals the chart.

In terms of revisions, as long as you keep the PowerPoint file (and chart) saved, you can re-record it with any changes fairly easily.

Eventually I found that an Excel chart looked even better than the native PowerPoint chart (no borders) and as long as I used Paste Special and kept it an Excel object, I could still animate the data series.

Finally we added a pictorial background to the slide and re-rendered the production after changing the text color of the data labels to white to accommodate the background.

Once rendered with a workable file format and codec in Camtasia Studio, it's just a matter of the DVD producer importing the video and making it part of the DVD title, or using it in any other way he or she sees fit.

Normally I wouldn't have chosen Quicktime as my output format; it is not very PowerPoint friendly so before using this video in PowerPoint on a Windows PC, I would convert it to AVI or WMV format. Or, I could use the MPEG2 movie from the DVD production in PowerPoint as well, although I would probably not use a video of the chart in PowerPoint when I could play it natively as a slide.

But in terms of animating and using business graphics as part of a DVD production, the combination of PowerPoint and Camtasia Studio (http://www.techsmith.com) can't be beat.

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