From PowerPoint to your TV screen

My sister-in-law Teri asked last week if I knew how to get a PowerPoint presentation onto DVD. She had a 180–slide PowerPoint presentation (made by someone else for a friend’s 50th wedding anniversary party), and they wanted to be able to pop a DVD into a player and watch the show on a big-screen TV.

I’ve written a few chapters on PowerPoint for various revisions of Special Edition Using Microsoft Office, but I’m far from an expert. I know that PowerPoint doesn’t natively support any video formats, and I found an interesting discussion of the topic here. But aside from those leads, I was stumped. So I was glad to get the follow-up today:

Got the 50th Anniversary project done via…

1. PowerPoint PPT to PPS (less memory use during screen capture)
2. Screen capture w/ CapturePad shareware 14-day non-crippled tryout (600×800 at 30 fps)
3. NeroVision Express to burn DVD Video w/Menu (It failed twice trying to burn directly from NeroVision Express, so had to burn to the hard drive first then copy via Nero Recode to DVD)
4. GoVideo VCR/DVD Player to copy from DVD to VHS tape

This would have been much easier if the author had created the original slide show in MS Movie Maker! PowerPoint is a bitch to match audio to video timing. I had a lot of cleaning up to do to get rid of awkward transitions and I had to shorten one of the WAV files with Creative Wave Studio–which is kinda like cutting sushi with a hatchet.

There were no fancy slide transitions or sound effects used in this 20-minute presentation–just an approximate 6-sec transition between still photo slides and background WAV music files. I don’t know how (or if) a fancy transition or effect would capture (or convert) to AVI–and I don’t have time to test it right now.

I screen-captured presentation with CapturePad to AVI with both video and audio UNCOMPRESSED. (The WAV files were already compressed.) I also noticed that there is a HUGE color loss going from the computer screen to NTSC. I think attention should be paid to colors used (as we do with web page art) and saturation of photos should be pumped up. I also set NeroVision to the highest quality video configuration and configured audio to Dolby 2.0. Make sure that any MICROPHONES (like soundcard headset or other inputs) are turned off (both in soundcard and CapturePad), or CapturePad will over-dubb the audio track with background noise (like me kindly yelling at the dog to get out of the office). The 22-minute, 186-slide presentation w/6 audio files ended up as only 858Mb on DVD.

I’m a happy camper.

I’ll have to try this one of these days!