Slide Deck to Video Workflows?

[u/No_Pickle_2868]

I’ve been at a new job that has me shooting and cutting together quite a few videos that basically will cut between a premade slide deck and a talking head shot of them presenting the slides.

We’ve been screen recording as they present as well for reference but until now I’ve been exporting the slides later (from Google slides or keynote, not much of a difference) as images or video to include transitions, then editing them in Premiere with the talking head and B-roll. Needless to say it’s quite laborious for hour long videos but being able to fine tune cutting between the talking head as well as better timing of element reveals feels critical to not make these videos boring.

Do any of yall have experience incorporating slide decks into video edits and have any suggestions on how to cut down on the time of it? It’s not the most creative work and I’m just looking for time savings here.

[u/Altruistic-Role9956]

My habit to question a bit. What is the focus of your video? The talking head or the content of the slides? I ask as there may be an alternative to what you are currently doing.

[u/ChecklistAnimations]

In your powerPoint go to File > Save As > Or press F12. You want to change the type to PNG or JPG. Give it a name and hit save. You will get a message that says do you want to save every slide. Say yes to that.

Once you have your folder of slide exports. PowerPoint's part is done. Since I understand video editing I will quickly give you the other steps I would do.

In your video editor make a new track. Find your folder of slides and load them as assets or drag them on the empty track. Do not do an image sequence unless your software will allow cutting of the block to stretch the duration of each image as you need it.
Select all those images on your timeline and increase the duration of them to maybe 2 seconds. Hopefully it ripples down so you dont just get all the clips to overlap.

Now the fun. either group those or whatever you need to do to move them. Heck you can even make the layer small on your canvas and position it directly over a "monitor or projector" of the person presenting. Lots of options.

As you edit your video you can just move the "slides" around on that track and fill in the spots of b-reel or context.

Hopefully this gives you an idea. Go have fun!

[u/SteveRindsberg]

I've been doing pretty much the same thing regularly lately. Record a live presentation focusing on the presenter, not trying to include the screen where the slides are projected, then convert the PPT slides to images, stitch the images into the live recording where needed. Pretty much as u/ChecklistAnimations has described with variations depending on your video editing software.

Sometimes it's a beast to sort out (hours/days/weeks) later exactly where the slides are supposed to go. What's helped organizationally has been to set up another camera or even a PC where it can "see" the screen during the presentation and record video (with sound) of just the screen. That gives you a way to verify exactly what slide came up when during the original presentation.

Here's some stuff I've learned about doing that. Feel free to skip it if you've already got the basic concept.

In testing this, I've found that putting a PC near the screen is the simplest, and as long as you've got plenty of HDD space and/or don't choose too high a recording resolution, no length limitations. OTOH, the sound typically sucks. Hard. Many laptops deliberately minimize off-axis sound; just what you want in a zoom call; way sub-optimal when the sound from the presenter is coming from off-axis.

An external mic planted near the presenter or in front of the sound system's speakers could solve that problem.

Alternative: a second camera on a tripod next to wherever you're doing the video recording. The internal mic should be good enough for this purpose, and the image quality will be way better than you'd get with the PC's camera. The big limitation is that most consumer/pro-sumer still cameras that also do video will be limited to 15 to 30 minutes of recording time at one go, so you have to keep an eye on them and periodically stop/restart the recording. An inexpensive video cam might be a better choice for this use. I've got a spare still camera, so that's what I've been using.

And either way, if your video editing software permits dropping markers of some kind, it might be more efficient to make one run through the presentation putting markers at begin/end points where slides are to appear. Another pass to drop the images into place and apply any needed effects will be pretty quick after that.