Video from Power Point

[gartar]

Hello,

I want to make video from power point presentation.
I have the power point document, but I can't import them in movie maker.
How can I do this?

Thank you in advance.

[jtara]

Why not play the presentation full-screen, and use a screen-capture program?

There are plenty of apps that will capture your screen to make a movie. It's a common need in instructional videos, etc.

[Samizdata]

I have always considered PowerPoint to be something of a joke, but in the interests of education I scoured my drives and eventually found one solitary .ppt file and booted up the program.

Lo and behold, under the File menu there was a Make Movie option (this was on a Mac version offering QuickTime export) so I tried it... and the program crashed. Three times in a row.

Hopefully someone else will be able to help you, but I see little point in making a video file of what is presumably a simple slideshow that could be done in Flash or JavaScript with a vastly smaller file size and no real worries about plugins and players.

If there are any PowerPoint fans out there I would be happy to be corrected.

[thecoalman]

Camstudio is free opensource desktop capture utility program you can use for that. Make sure to capture to lightly compressed format then convert it afterwards to a compressed format like mpeg, wmv or whatever fits your needs.

[weeks]

Good discussion. I'm about the try the same thing. I'll report back on by ppt > video experience. Meanwhile, any other suggestions.

[weeks]

My report so far--something is screwy. I think. I made a .mov with Powerpoint, but I can't edit it in iMovie. Not that I know what I'm doing.

[weeks]

OK, you need some software to edit the audio and video at all; you can edit within Powerpoint, of course, but it's not easy. A very rough video can be done. I used Powerpoint to put together a rough visual sample to turn over to a pro.

[weeks]

OK, here's my brief report on using the "make a video" on PowerPoint.

First, I'm on a Mac. But, this may be useful to all.

The video that PowerPoint makes is a .mov. That is, it's Quicktime. Sounds good, right? Well, if you want to record a very, very, very rough video using the clicker to time the slides, this will work. But, it will stink. You need to edit.

My advice is to purchase Quicktime Pro ($30--which is available for Windows, BTW.) Convert the PowerPoint into individual slides, import the slides in order into Quicktime Pro, turning that into a movie (it's fast and easy, read the directions) and then edit that movie in either Quicktime Pro (more powerful than it first looks--check out the options) or, if you have it, iMovie. At the end, you can put your audio on it.

This advice even applies if you have a Mac and iMovie. For reasons that probably having to do with PowerPoint being MS and iMovie being Apple, I couldn't edit the .mov made by PowerPoint in iMovie. But, I could use iMovie after pushing it through QT pro as I outlined above.

Making a movie via PowerPoint may sound wacky to some but not to me. If you're a whiz with PowerPoint or you have a lot of PowerPoints you want to put onto YouTube, this might get you there.

[Edge]

Adobe Captivate can import a Power Point and export to a Shockwave. Not cheap though..