need PPT to play small (pre-defined timings) in sync w/ video
Jul 24, 2012
Hello,
I'm a longtime Adobe person, so I've been trying to get a trial version of Captivate to do what I need it to do, unsucessfully. If there's any Articulate software that can do this, I'll be happy to chose it over Adobe.
Our company hosts outside speakers for continuing professional education lectures. I will be video taping these lectures with a Canon DV camcorder. What we would like to see is the video of the lecturer playing in sync with their powerpoint (timings recorded in Powerpoint by the lecture) as two separate, SMALL windows. (See image below for an example of what I'm really trying to emulate.) In captivate, the PPTX imports as many different captivate slides. If I was able to resize all the PPT slides into a smaller view, this would be fine as the video is set to play "rest of project" and so, each would maintin a reduced space within the frame as the Captivate slides advance. But the PP slides import as full frame and the video simply covers part of the slide. I tried resaving the PPTX at a smaller size (96PPI) and importing. I've tried up-sizing the entire project so that the imported PPTX will be smaller. It doesn't work - PPT slides still gofull frame. And anyway, this isn't really a great solution since the best you can do is make the PP slides go to one or another corner (vs. being able to resize as needed for an effective balance of the two frames-video & powerpoint).
Another wrinkle is that since the video and powerpoint slides will be synced BEFORE they're ever inported into Captivate, the user needs a way to pause BOTH if needed, instead of just one. Disabling the skin on the video would prevent them from pausing the video and cause the PPT to get out of sync. However, from my test, it appears that the pause button for the entire presentation at the bottom of the playback window does not pause the video AND powerpoint slides, just the powerpoint.
I'm tired of beating my head against the wall with Captivate, and their tech support is of no help. Can Storyline or any other Articulate software accomplish the above requirements? I really don't want to go the route of editing a split screen video. The file size will be unnecessarily big for the Powerpoint 1/2 of the frame. Plus, it's not very attractive. PLEASE HELP!
2 Replies
Lorin,
If you are recording speakers and want their presentation materials synced together, you should look into a Mediasite system. However, it is not a software program like Captivate or Storyline.
http://www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite
We have this system where I work and it is really simple to use and works great. Let me know if you have any questions after looking at their website.
Hi Lorin! I think you could do this in Storyline. If the lecturers are able to set the duration of individual slides in PowerPoint (or perhaps someone else could do this after the fact, by playing your video of the presenter and setting the slide durations accordingly), you could use PowerPoint to do a Save As and save the entire presentation as a WMV. Then insert that WMV onto a Storyline slide, and insert the video of the Presenter alongside it. For both videos, you can resize them on the slide to be whatever size you want.
In Storyline you can use the built-in seekbar on the course player to pause the slide timeline (meaning both videos on the slide would pause).
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