A Concise Collection of PowerPoint to Video Solutions

Having problem in sharing a stunning PowerPoint presentation with your groups via the Internet? This guy fails to open your masterpiece because he has no PowerPoint installed on his PC; that girl cannot get a full view of your presentation – sounds lost, 3D effects disabled, for she uses a lower version of PowerPoint. So why not consider converting the PowerPoint stuff to video? You know, the universal format video is your best bet for distributing a presentation that almost anyone can playback on any computer, no matter a Mac or a Windows.

The coming question is,

How to convert a PowerPoint presentation to video?

When you Google, you may find a wealth of solutions to transferring PowerPoint to video. Here I sum up the PowerPoint-video solutions in 3 simple categories.

1. Conversion Software like Moyea PPT to Video Converter

2. Screen Recorders like Camtasia Studio & Adobe Captivate

3. Microsoft Related – Windows Movie Maker, Photo Story 3 & Quick Time Movie in Mac PowerPoint

Now we are forwarding to the conversion details of each solution.

1. Conversion Software like Moyea PPT to Video Converter

Many third-party shareware can assist you in converting a PowerPoint presentation to a video. Take Moyea PPT to Video Converter for example. Moyea PPT to Video Converter is an efficient program that can convert your PowerPoint presentations to videos like AVI, FLV, WMV, MPEG, MP4, MOV, 3GP and 3G2 in the truest manner. The converter can retain all the original components including animations and sounds from PowerPoint to video, making it a comfort to upload the presentation to YouTube, blogs and podcasts and to view it on your iPod, iPhone and Blackberry.

To convert a PowerPoint presentation to video with Moyea PPT to Video, do these three steps:

Step 1 - Install the PowerPoint to video converter and import the presentation(s) that you want to convert.

Step 2 - Select a proper output format. You can also customize parameters for the output video as necessary.

Step 3 - Click “Start” to convert the presentation to video.

2. Screen Recorders like Camtasia Studio & Adobe Captivate

Screen recording software can also help creating a video from your PowerPoint presentation.

I. Camtasia Studio 6.1

A popular program for that job is Camtasia Studio 6.1 from TechSmith. Do the following:

Download and install Camtasia Studio on your local computer.

Open the program, and select Record PowerPoint in the Task List. MS PowerPoint prompts up. Open the PowerPoint presentation to record. Set the recording options from the PowerPoint Add-in Toolbar. Then click the red Record button to enter the presentation. Click the “Click to begin recording” button. When finish recording, specify a name and location and save as *.camrec file.

Next, continue to edit the recording. Select the slide size, arrange the transitions, add effects, or edit audios.

Last, produce a video in a sharable format (WMV, MOV, AVI…)

II. Adobe Captivate 4

Another video capturing application is Adobe Captivate 4.

Download and install Adobe Captive 4 on your computer. Open the program, in the main interface, click From MS PowerPoint in the Create Project tab to select a PowerPoint file to convert.

Customize the new PowerPoint project by adding an audio file, redefine a slide timeline, set video quality, etc. Click OK to start converting the file to SWF.

You can edit the slides in the left Slide Tasks panel. Once ready, click the Publish ribbon to enter the Publish interface. In the prompt up, select Media, set the media type as “Video (*. avi)” and type a title for the video project.

The SWF to AVI conversion starts. Finally, you will get an AVI video based on your presentation.

Limitation: Adobe Captive 4 converts a PowerPoint presentation to AVI only. If you want to convert it to other video formats, it won’t help.

3. Microsoft Related – Windows Movie Maker, Photo Story 3 and Save As MOV in Mac PowerPoint

Microsoft provides some supplements that can aid in making a PowerPoint video. Let’s have a look:

A. Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is free for Windows XP or Vista users. It lets you create a home movie out of texts and images.

To make a video from PowerPoint, you need to save all the slides in your presentation as like *.jpg or *.png. Go to Office (in PowerPoint 2007) or File (in PowerPoint 97-2003)-> Save As -> Other Formats, in the popup Save As box, select the type to either of the above graphical formats. Then choose to export every slide as the specified picture format.

A folder containing the exported slides with the same name of the original presentation is generated. Open Windows Movie Maker, and import the separate slides to collections one by one. After that, drag all the imported slide images and drop to Storyboard. If you wish, right click a slide image to add video effects for it.

Finally, go back to the File menu, and save the slide collection as movie file.

Note - all the dynamic effects (like audio or video clips) in the original presentation are lost in the generated movie.

B. Microsoft Photo Story 3

Microsoft Photo Story 3 is only free available for Windows XP users. If you are a qualified user for this, then download and install Photo Story 3 for Windows on your PC. Similar to that in Windows Movie Maker, you have to save each single slide to *.jpg or *.png for Photo Story 3. Then import the pictures to the program, edit it by adding a title, an effect, a narration, or background music for output video.

Once it is ready, proceed to the output type. It will be generated to a video in WMV. You can save the WMV file for playback on your computer, in Email, or for playback on a pocket PC or a Smartphone with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

Again, all the animated elements including audios, movie clips and transitions in the source PowerPoint presentation won’t appear in the WMV file.

C. QuickTime movie for Mac PowerPoint

For Mac PowerPoint users, there is a "Make Movie" (QuickTime Movie) feature. Actually, the movie is a slide show that can run on any application that supports QuickTime movies. Also, note that transitions in the original presentation may play differently in the QuickTime movie, and that animations will be completely missing in the movie. You’d better re-save it with QuickTime Pro.

From PowerPoint to video, your presentation has become more accessible on Internet and on the go with such a wide selection of convenient software applications. Easy job, enjoy it!