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I want to give an update to the post below about capturing presentations made over PA systems to use as podcasts or internal training audios. Here’s another step: synchronize the PowerPoints from the presentation with the soundtrack you’ve captured.
I got hold of the PowerPoint file from our recent new-staff orientation, extracted the frames that correspond to the segments I had captured on my laptop, and exported them from PowerPoint as JPEG files. This weekend as an experiment I used Windows Movie Maker–an accessory program that comes free with Windows XP–to create a movie of the presentation. I’m not posting the video link yet because this all came about by serendipity, and I didn’t ask the people I recorded if I could put them on the net. Maybe later.
All you do is import each JPEG into Movie Maker and extend the time the slide appears in the production to equal the time it was on the screen during the original presentation. The soundtrack you produced as an MP3 for a podcast becomes the time-line for the production. The trick is listening to find out precisely when the transitions from slide to slide took place. Once the slide durations correspond to the soundtrack, you save the movie as a WMV file. Then you can upload it to a video host site or burn it to a disk for distribution.
So don’t let those presentations get away. You’ve paid for them; capture the audio and PowerPoints (I know we’re all a little sick of PowerPoints) to get more mileage out of them.
