PowerPoint Tip: Creating a video of your presentation from your slides and an audio recording

Today’s tip comes from some work I’ve been doing coaching a couple of professional speaking colleagues on how to create a movie of a presentation for use by their client on the web for ongoing training. It is also one of the topics I’ll be covering in my Presentation Summit session today.

To create a movie from your slides, you can go the high-end route and use software like Camtasia to record the slides and audio from the presentation as it is going on and create the movie. But this is software that you may not have and you may not be allowed to purchase and install it on your computer.

Instead, I’ve been showing them how to create a movie from an audio track and the images of their slides. It starts with recording the audio for the movie. The easiest way to record audio is using Audacity, a terrific free audio editor available here. Save your audio file as an MP3 file using the Export function in Audacity.

Next, you need to create images of your slides. This is simple enough in PowerPoint as you can use the Save As feature to save the slides as PNG images. Select to save all slides and it will create a folder of sequentially numbered slide images. The one potential issue with this method is that animation builds get removed, as the image saved is the state that you see when editing the slides. If you have used animation, you have two options. First, you can create sequentially numbered images using a screen capture utility like Lightscreen. Or, you can create your own series of slides for each animated slide. If you do this, first remove all animation from the slide, then copy and paste the slide the required number of times. Finally, remove elements as needed to create a series of slides that, when shown in sequence, appear as the original animated slide. Now when you Save As PNG images, you will get a series of images that appears as if it was animated.

The final step is to create the movie in movie editing software. If you have Windows Movie Maker already installed on your computer, you can use it. You can also download the latest version from Microsoft’s web site. I find the latest version hard to use for this purpose because they removed the timeline view. If you don’t want to install software, you can use one of the free online video editing sites, like the one I use called Jaycut.com. You add the audio track to the timeline, then place each slide on the timeline and adjust the length of time the slide is shown based on the audio track. Output the finished video to a movie file and you are ready to distribute it or post it to your web site.

Creating a video of your presentation allows you to distribute it in new ways and it will run on web sites, local computers, and even mobile devices. Use the steps above to create your first presentation video.