Converting Powerpoint to Video

voyagerfan99

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
I have a powerpoint presentation that has video clips in it. I know you can save the powerpoint to a WMV, but then the video playback is choppy. My goal is to make the ppt into a video so I can put it on a DVD using DVD Flick. Anyone know how I can do this?

I already tried making the video in movie maker but it won't save the final project.
 
Probably the most straightforward is to use Camtasia but that's not cheap. I commented this week that Camtasia was not a great video editor but it is designed for making presentations from on-screen capture. There are a number of online services (use Google). They seem to be geared more to small size video.

An alternative at better price are Fraps and ZD Soft Screen Recorder which are geared to recording games on-screen. I've not used either.

I assume your presentation has embedded video. If you have the original videos, you could reconstitute the presentation in a good video editor using the video resized and superimposed per the presentation and making stills of the background from ppt (time-stretch stills to ppt length). You would lose all the transition effects unless you recreated in the video editor. You can certainly do all this with Vegas and Premiere which would also have most of the effects available in ppt.
 
Yeah, the fiancee and I did this last year for her grandfathers funeral. She had already made a power point for the funeral and had added the audio, and it was a nice presentation. BUT, the stupid funeral home didn't have the connections or equipment to play a ppt file. So I had to convert it to a video format. We would have used a 3rd party software, but I was in a time crunch and didn't have the time to learn another software just for it to not be what I needed.

I wont lie, the way we did it caused pretty poor quality . We lost a LOT of clarity of the slide images and some of the text on the slides was almost unreadable. We were able to change the slides for better clarity and different fonts, it helped some. But it wasn't perfect. The conversion also cut some of the slides smaller, to where some of the slides were missing a large area all around the border. Adding the audio was easy, of course.

We used MS-PPT 2007 and then windows movie maker on XP. Here is how I did it:


  1. Make the power point
  2. Save the .ppt as a power point file, for a backup of the project
  3. Go to "Save As", and save your PowerPoint slide show as ".PNG",".JPG" images
  4. Open Windows Movie Maker and import the saved .png / .jpg images into Windows Movie Maker
  5. Select all images that have been added from the power point and add them to the time line and add any transitions/music/etc...
  6. Then I would save it as a windows movie maker project file (as a backup!)
  7. Then convert the windows movie maker project to the format you need

There HAS to be a better way of doing this! Though, this is how we did it, and I thought I'd pass it along.
 
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I have quite an old version of PowerPoint so I don't know if my comments are still valid. Gamblingman's method is quite good and parallels my method. You can improve quality fairly easily.

My PPT gives slide jpgs at 75% quality, 2:2 subformat and they are 793x595 pixels. 75% is poor. The 2:2 subformat is crappy for sharp detail like text, giving rise to "mosquitoes" and "edge halo". The png output is better quality but at the same dimensions. In my version of PPT you have no control over jpg size and quality so png is preferred.

An alternative is to use a capture utility (loads out there). I use FastStone. Set up to capture fullscreen, bmp format. Run the slideshow and capture the slides as you go. Bmp format does not suffer from degradation and you have slides at screen size. The only loss is PPT sizing to the screen. You can stick those bmps into your graphic editor. Png or bmp should both be fine.

Edit: A further advantage of screen capture is that you can duplicate certain animations. Suppose one slide has text appearing, followed by 4 images in sequence, you can capture each stage for a total of 6 captures. Saving that slide as a jpg or png with PPT produces one image with everything on it.
 
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It annoys me that both are very popular microsoft software and lots of people need a good way to convert ppt to video. I dont know why microsoft hasnt released a plug-in and/or program to convert one to the other with high quality.
 
gamblingman said:
It annoys me that both are very popular microsoft software and lots of people need a good way to convert ppt to video. I dont know why microsoft hasnt released a plug-in and/or program to convert one to the other with high quality.
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Sometimes you wonder what they're doing at MS. They seem to be more interested in producing pretty interfaces than functional innovation (although W7 may be in the right direction compared to Vista). Good news for independent software developers. If memory serves me, Adobe Captivate (was from Macromedia) is more friendly towards presentations transferring to video.
 
I tried cam studio, which worked good until it compiled half way, then it couldn't merge the sound and video. I'm going to give it another try.

Worst case, my boss brings home a large LCD and a laptop to play it on. (He owns a computer store so he has all the equipment he needs)
 
While I was looking into Nero on another thread, I saw the following for Nero Vision Xtra. "Convert PowerPoint presentations to DVD or Blu-ray Disc for HDTV playback. Supports Microsoft Office 2010". So $60 and off you go!

Best case, your boss brings home Nero Vision Xtra for your diligent work.
 
Problem is solved. He's just gonna use an external display and a laptop.

Could a mod lock this so we don't get converter spam?
 
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