Learn to make great slides.
Sometimes it’s necessary to shoot a full video with a presenter against a background with all the necessary audio, lighting and camera equipment that this requires; sometimes well-made slide videos can get the message across just as effectively even without the presence of a huge website video production.
You won’t use slide presentations all the time; they should be used in combination with other videos, but they can be especially useful for quick sales presentations or as an accompaniment to audio interviews, for example.
We use a simple five step process using a Mac to create effective slide videos, and if you are a PC user, you can obtain equivalent software suitable for your computer.
The first thing to do is to script and record the video sales letters audio that you’re going to use for your presentation using tried and tested website video production. This will usually be short piece of around three minutes. It may be short, but it still needs to be delivered confidently and fluently, so you will need to practice a few times to be able to achieve this.
Once you have this audio, the next step is to edit it. If there are too many pauses, or if you say ‘um’ repeatedly, this will distract your listeners, so you can edit out these things.
Now that you have the audio complete, the next step is to map out your presentation slides in Keynote. Remember to keep this simple. Use a maximum of two colours, two fonts and two sizes on your slides. You may be tempted to try fancy fonts and use any number of colours, but some months down the track, you will look at the slides and see that they are over elaborate and lack style. This tip applies to anything you do online – you want to keep it very simple.
Once you have made the slides and recorded and edited the audio, you then need to use ScreenFlow to record a rough version. ScreenFlow is a screen-recording and editing tool for Macs for creating screencasts, presentations, tutorials and product demos. Use ScreenFlow to bring up the presentation you have made and then play the audio you have recorded in an external player which should be placed directly underneath the microphone on the Mac so it picks up the audio.
It is then a matter of matching the audio to the slides. You click through the slides and choose the length of each slide to match what is being said. You will then have everything perfectly synchronized.
For the final edit, you then drag this version into iMovie and detach the rough audio you have just recorded with the perfect audio you completed earlier.
This is great for Skype interviews and phone interviews, but you don’t need to worry so much about the quality video, just make sure the slides and the audio match up. For slide based sales presentations, this process should work very well.
If you would like more help with making professional looking slide presentations using website video production, contact the team at Melbourne Video Production or click here for more video production tips. We will be happy to help with any queries you may have.
