Presenter Video Sidebar

[C Towsley]

My client wishes to know if Presenter would be the solution for some online product demonstrations they're giving in a couple of weeks, so I've been trying to figure it out today and I'm not having much luck.

From what I've been reading in the past hour or more, I see that the size of the video cannot be changed in the sidebar. But, what size is recommended for that area? The video I've been provided must be too large, yet when I rescale the browser window, the width changes so that it looks right. The height does not appear to alter.

Secondly, the people presenting have been pre-recorded. Do I have to take the video and split it into pieces for each slide? I tried doing that with the built-in editing program and it didn't work, the video in the sidebar always started back at the beginning. While I can make the individual slide bits, that's not a problem, but I'm concerned there may be a pause or drop frame between slides. Should the videos be formatted to fade to black between each one or is there no noticeable pause? Also, it appears that you cannot use the sidebar video to advance the slides. Is this correct? From what I've been reading, I would have to either strip out the audio from each video clip, then import it and replace it with silence, or perhaps put something on the slide to cue it to advance (for example, a box off of the slide to appear at 23 seconds which would then advance the slide in Presenter as it does appear to honour animation timings).

Am I on the right track or is there an easier way to do this? If we didn't need to have the presenter video at the side, I'd just screen capture it all with Camtasia and be done with it.

[C Towsley]

Well, I appear to have answered my own questions.

So, if you're reading this post, and are experiencing the same problems I was, cut your videos down in a proper video editing program (not the internal tool) to 240x180, FLV 30fps. Have one video for each slide sidebar, then set your slide transitions to the length of your video. First video segment is 15 seconds? Advance slide automatically after 15 seconds. There will be a little dip to black between slides/video cuts but it's not substantial.

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

Well, now that you have gone through all that pain and effort, you may want to consider looking at Captivate. Captivate gives you the ability to take a video and spread it across a presentation and it does a great job of capturing a product demonstration as well.

I do like Presenter, don't get me wrong, but it is a simple tool for creating quick and easy presentations.

[C Towsley]

This is a client-directed request. They are looking into several companies to host their webcasts and one of those companies suggested using Presenter. After I review it, if it works with what they want, I will suggest Captivate to my client, perhaps that web hosting company does accept those kind of files but didn't offer up that information.

Also, it's not really a product demonstration in the traditional sense, they have created a bunch of PowerPoint files and wanted the ability to cue their slide changes to their pre-recorded videos. They don't do software so it's not like they can just do a live screen recording such as the one I watched a couple of weeks ago from BorisFX. Of course the other downside to all of this is that only one presenter worked from a script, so this morning I have been researching how to transcribe video since the client doesn't have a robust budget. No matter what program is used, a script is going to have to be generated so that the cues can be set.