PowerPoint by Death or Booming?

Is PowerPoint passed by death or surviving with boom?
Are the tedious PowerPoint presentations driving you sleepy, fidget or even mad?

How to avoid getting such scrapes?

What’s your opinion?

PowerPoint to DVD Converter--Camtasia and Wondershare PPT2DVD

PowerPoint is among the most prevalent forms of persuasive technology used by business people, educators, students and trainers. Suppose you need to burn PowerPoint to DVD, I know it is not very popular, the most common reasons for converting PowerPoint to DVD are usability, portability and storage. Since DVD has become the preferred video format for most consumer applications and computer peripherals, creating a PowerPoint DVD makes good sense for storing and sharing. The DVD can be played on PCs which support DVD and TV with a DVD player connected.

Nowadays there are two types of tools meet the standard for converting PowerPoint to DVD. One is the screen recording tool and the other is the PowerPoint converter. The typical examples for these two types are TechSmith Camtasia and Wondershare PPT2DVD, after the testing, you may find the difference between these two tools.

TechSmith Camtasia (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp)

TechSmith Camtasia allows customers to create professional and engaging presentations, demonstrations and marketing videos in HD-quality video to reach audiences online, on portable media devices, or on popular online video sharing sites. Furthermore, Camtasia provides a PowerPoint add-in which can quickly and easily record PowerPoint presentations and produce DVD right from within PowerPoint.

Pros of using Camtasia to convert PowerPoint to DVD:

1. Staring slide show in PowerPoint, you may advance the presentation as you wish. The output will look the same as rehearse.

2. You may add narrations into your slide show while playing in PowerPoint.

3. You may edit the recorded video with Camtasia. Many great and practical features are provided.

4. You can save the video file to almost all of the common multimedia formats like SWF, MP4, AVI, WMV, MOV, RM, EXE and GIF.

5. A 30 days free try may meet your short term demand.

Cons of using Camtasia to convert PowerPoint to DVD: You need a powerful computer (higher than mainstream configuration) to run Camtasia smoothly because it consumes a lot system resources when recording PowerPoint. The recommended RAM is 2GB and the processor is 3GHz. The recording process may be freeze sometime if your PC is a dog. When burning the PowerPoint video to DVD, a third part DVD burning software is needed.

Wondershare PPT2DVD (http://www.ppt-to-dvd.com)

“If you're interested in sharing your PowerPoint presentations as DVDs to be played on a DVD player, this program gives you a simple, no-fuss way to do it. Wondershare PPT2DVD burns a completed presentation to a DVD, and includes all aspects of it, including transitions, music, videos, and so on.” From PC world, Preston Gralla.

As the first program that provides the PowerPoint to DVD solution, PPT2DVD has its own features such as:

1. The converting process is very simple and no-fuss just as Preston said, import the PowerPoint presentations into the program (you can import 12 files at a time), choose the right output format and some advanced settings if you need, then the program can convert your PowerPoint presentation to DVD without your attendance.

2. The DVD menu makes the output more easily to navigate. You can jump to the right presentation with a DVD remote control.

3. The playing mode, playing DVD automatically or manually gives you more choices when presenting your PowerPoint to your audience on TV.

4. It retains all sounds, animations, video clips and even the hyperlinks (between slides) in the output files.

5.Compared to Camtasia, an average configured is power enough for Wondershare PPT2DVD.

Compare to the first conversion method, in the converting process, you cannot figure out how will the output looks like. Just like a black box, you don’t know what happened in it. Sometimes it may lead the unpredictable failure. And, PPT2DVD can just record the elements in the PowerPoint, it is not possible for you to add your voice to your presentation, hope this function will be added in the future version.

Still, there are many other PowerPoint to DVD/video tools on the Internet like Acoolsoft PPT2DVD, E.M. Free PowerPoint Video Converter, authorSTREAM and so on. Users who are looking for the PowerPoint to DVD/video converter can have an evaluation about them.

Free Valentine’s Day PowerPoint templates and gift

Valentine's Day with all its charisma and magnetism is coming. We are busy with preparing Valentine’s gift for our sweetheart. Maybe some of us may not know how to express love to our beloved. Chocolates, flowers, candlelight dinner are the common programs we adopted to spend the Valentine’s Day every year. How can we make some creative ideas to spend our Valentine’s Day this year?

Making valentine day card seemed to be a wonderful idea. You can express out your sincere feelings to your lovers. Considering traditional paper ones are easy to go corrupt and not ideal for preserving and recycling, electronic ones become my choice. As it to me, I prefer using PowerPoint to form the content of my valentine card first, and then generate a video for it. Words like:

1.Comforting me when I am sad,
2.Loving me when I am mad,
3.Teaching me the meaning of love,
4.Encouraging me when I need a shove,
5.But most of all thanks for loving me.
And so on, do let him or her know our feeling.

When making PowerPoint for Valentine’s gift, we can design PowerPoint templates by ourselves, and also there are some free Valentine’s PowerPoint templates we can download, just click here to download the free Valentine’s Day PowerPoint templates.

To preserve our romantic memory, we can convert our PowerPoint presentation to video then upload it to YouTube like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbrOSNsNUWo&fmt=18. Converting PowerPoint presentation to DVD and send the DVD to our beloved instead of paper may retain the romantic memory forever! Here every one, show our inspiration with our Valentine’s Day gift and have a happy Valentine’s Day!

Valentine's Gift idea--Watch your own Love Story Movie

Valentine's Day with all its charisma and magnetism is coming. Although we can send gift and shower love to our sweetheart all year round, we still need to grasp this perfect occasion to express our love and warm heart to beloved as we may especially be busy occupying our jobs during the economic recession.

During this romantic season, we are showered with tons of romantic gifts ideas and Valentine's Day celebration tips each year. After several years, we still wonder what would be the best gift and dating method to enjoy the Valentine's Day. Flowers (especially roses with scarlet color) would fade and be pale after several days. Chocolates will make you become fat and can't be preserved long too. And we do not like soft toys, gift baskets, candles and sweets. We can’t afford for luxurious diamonds, perfume, watches, jewelry.

Are you distressed by lacking of gift idea too?

I hope my idea would inspire you after following my experience and story.

My boyfriend is my classmate during college. Several years have passed. Many harmony memory and pictures left for us to memorize.

There are many pictures preserved on our PC since we are passionate about making excursions/trips and taking photos on holiday or weekend;

My sweetheart presented me a TOSHIBA laptop as Christmas gift which comes with Ulead DVD MovieFactory for TOSHIBA Launcher and DVD burner. It empowers me to make DVD from pictures and videos easily.

It preserves longer and it also would be a good fortune for your future generation to know the life you once lead.

Through recollecting the history and impressive story between you and your beloved, I believe that:

Romance would fill the air;
Scintillating passions of love would come alive;
Loving hearts would come closer;
It should help us to cherish each other and walk through the economic crisis season smoothly hand in hand.

At the beginning, I planned to create DVD photo album using Ulead DVD MovieFactory for TOSHIBA. After evaluating, it is really a time-consuming task to compile all the memorable pictures and set the proper transition one by one.

In fact, I am a big preserver of memories. I am used to making photo albums using PowerPoint 2007 after each journey or trip, as it enables you to adjust contrast and brightness of each picture, add captions and GIF decorations freely, and set transitions and animations at your will. Frantic, I searched in Google and find a tool which can convert presentations to DVD. You can also Google PowerPoint to DVD and evaluate them to find the suitable PowerPoint converters which came to your eyes.

The PowerPoint to DVD tool I use for converting my PowerPoint to DVD is Wondershare PPT2DVD.

After getting the tool, I just imported the presentations, chose the TV standard by selecting country, designed the DVD layout and another click to directly burn a DVD, my project is well on its way to completion. It effectively handles all the features I used in PowerPoint presentation. No animations, transitions and sound effect were blown away. I can even control the slide if only I chose the manual mode.

At last, I put 8 presentations on the first DVD. And we are classmate during college. Therefore, I put the campus life and the scenery there as the first chapter. I also recorded a song named Missing You in English as the DVD menu background music. Here below are the ones and screenshots.

Our campus life
Our first Valentine
Our seaside happiness
Our hometown tripsⅠ
Our hometown tripsⅡ
Our engaged ceremony
Our first anniversary
Our Hawaii dream

Here below are some other tips for you to follow.

Optimize the pictures by changing the contrast, brightness and removing dreaded "red eyes". Picasa is a good choice to edit your pictures.
Arrange your pictures in chronological order.
You can add some gif decorations to your slideshow.
You can record some sweet words in the presentations.
You can also record a song if you are the musician type.

Enjoy it!

To reminisce the good times you and your beloved have passed through, may you have a fantastic and freaking Valentine's Day!

You can also download the free Valentine’s PowerPoint templates here.

Share PowerPoint on Slideshare and YouTube

PowerPoint stored on the web may be very convenience to many people.  No need to worry about losing video clips and sound file inserted into PowerPoint when delivery presentation via email, no need to worry about if there are PowerPoint installed on your customers’ computer and the different version of the PowerPoint.  No matter how far the distance is, the PowerPoint can be easily shared with a URL address only with a live Internet connection.

People who want to make sales promotion presentations, courseware and conferencepresentations may benefit a lot from sharing PowerPoint online. The presentation URL is permanent on the Internet and can be easily access.

There are many sites that can share PowerPoint online like Slideshare, Slideboom, Scribedand so on. Currently, Slideshare is the most famous presentation sharing site. But people will not agree with this opinion that Slideshare is the most famous video sharing website. Of course YouTube cannot be ignored. Below are the differences when uploading PowerPoint presentation between Slideshare and YouTube.

Uploading PowerPoint to Slideshare

Support formats: PowerPoint- ppt, pps, pot; OpenOffice- odp, pdf; Apple Keynote- upload as .zip or pdf; Microsoft Office- doc, rtf, xls; OpenOffice- odt, ods, pdf.
For pptx or docx (Microsoft Office 2007+), save in lower version (ppt/doc) or save as pdf.
Max size: 100 MB
Privacy option: share publicly/privately

Slideshare has published a new PowerPoint add-on, SlideShare ribbon for Microsoft PowerPoint 2007. With this add-on, you can now manage all your SlideShare uploads from PowerPoint, search through presentations on SlideShare, browse your contacts and groups’ presentations and also download them into PowerPoint.

Disadvantages: When uploading PowerPoint to Slideshare, the sound, animations, video clips in the PowerPoint will lose. What you can see is just a group of static images. And, if you use PowerPoint 2007, you should save your PowerPoint in 2003 or lower version, because slideshare.net now does not support uploading PowerPoint 2007 presentations.

Uploading PowerPoint to YouTube

In fact, YouTube cannot accept any PowerPoint format. But as YouTube is one of the top 3 traffic sites in the world, there must be some methods to make it possible to view PowerPoint on YouTube. Yes, just convert your PowerPoint to MP4 or WMV format, and thenupload PowerPoint to YouTube. Below is the knowledge when uploading PowerPoint video to YouTube.
Learn how to uploading PowerPoint to YouTube

Support formats: MP4, WMV preferred
Max size: 1G
Privacy Option: share publicly/privately

YouTube now support 16 x 9 high definition video, maybe it is new trend in modern video, When converting you PowerPoint to MP4 or WMV, you’d better choose the resolution 1290 x 720 (16x9 HD) while viewing the YouTube video you can choose the option “watch in HD” below the video thus you can get the best effect.  640 x 480 (4:3 SD) is also viable, while play these videos on YouTube, you can choose the option “watch in high quality” to get the best effect.
And the new function greeting card, made it possible to send video greeting cards to your friends and family. Most importantly, converting PowerPoint to video with PPT to Video then upload to YouTube can retain all animations, sound, video clips in the PowerPoint.

Disadvantage: When sharing PowerPoint in YouTube, the videos are not clear enough if you do not convert your PowerPoint to a HD video. And if the PowerPoint can be uploaded to YouTube directly one day, it will be better for PowerPoint sharing.

Below are two sample video clips, the left is from slideshare.net, the other is from YouTube. You can tell the difference.

PowerPoint on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaeX4-XZahY
PowerPoint on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/Judith.R/christmas-idea-2-presentation
PowerPoint embedded in the website:  http://ppt-to-dvd.com/ppt-to-video-overview.html

Show your Christmas wishes to the world via YouTube

From home to home and heart to heart from one place to another, the wishes of Christmas, bring us closer to each other. In this Christmas season, you may take part in the family reunion, friends’ party and exchange gift with your friends. The kids are writing letters to the Santa and the parents may busy with shopping. Do you have any other Christmas ideas?

When suffering on the Internet, I found a comedy “Steve Martin - 5 Christmas Wishes” on YouTube. Steve Martin shows his 5 Christmas wishes all over the world. If you like, you can also show your Christmas wishes to all via YouTube, maybe the Santa can meet your wishes.

Two ways for you to show your wishes on YouTube

Recording a video with Video Recorder is the most common way. No professional technology needed, just stand before a video recorder, speak out your Christmas wishes then upload this video onto YouTube. The recommendable video format upload to the YouTube are WMV and MP4 so you may need to convert your video to these formats.

 

While the second way you may consider is using PowerPoint to show your Christmas wishes and then uploading the PowerPoint to YouTube with PPT to Video like thishttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzw15c86big

Recording videos to show your Christmas wishes is the most direct way but it is hard to edit the video. Using PowerPoint to present your Christmas wishes is better. You can insert the video into PowerPoint, and also record your voice when creating PowerPoint presentations. With many elegant animations and music, PowerPoint can surely present your Christmas withesbetter. 

And any other ideas to show your Christmas wishes?

 

How to Best Prepare PowerPoint Slides for Video & DVD Production

by Bob from bobsloan.com

Many times we have incorporated our client’s PowerPoint slides into their video and DVD productions. Because computer displays and television displays are different, keeping a few things in mind will be of help to both of us.
PowerPoint presentations are optimized for computers. DVDs are optimized for television. There are a number of differences between high-resolution output for computers and low-resolution output for television. Basically, computer resolution is far greater than television’s resolution of 720 x 486 pixels (NTSC). Also, normal televisions at a minimum crop as much as 10% from around the edge (5% from each edge), resulting in a number of consequences when incorporating PowerPoint images into your video production and then to DVD. Keeping the following guidelines in mind when designing your PowerPoint presentation will help insure a good DVD experience as well.

These are as follows
• Try to use 30 pt fonts or higher as small text may get lost on video.
• Use sans serif (e.g. Arial, Helvetica) bold fonts.
• Use no more than 4 or 5 lines of text per slide.
• Avoid the color red, use darker colors and greens and blues.
• Keep your graphics simple.
• Provide at least a 15% border around the edge.
We realize that these recommendations may seem limiting to you for your live presentation but it helps to be aware of this. In addition, audiences basically prefer simpler graphics. Too much information can cause them to disassociate altogether with the slide.

These are related…

5 methods for you to play PowerPoint on DVD/TV
5 ways to convert PowerPoint to Video