Creating PC / MAC usable presentations with audio?

  • Thread starter Thread starter W Klofkorn
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W

W Klofkorn

Problem: Using Powerpoint slide presentations and digital audio files
recorded during said presentations, how would one best and most easily go
about creating output that is renderable on CD-R, and usable on both Mac and
CD platforms when you can't assume the person receiving the disk has
PowerPoint on the target machine?

What we've come up with so far (there has to be a better way) is to use MS
Power Point Producer to create a narrated slide show by looking at a
videotape of the PowerPoint and manually clicking the slide changes. This we
use only to get the timings from as the output from Producer isn't
cross-platform compatible (not reliably in our experience). Then we output
the PowerPoint to Macromedia Flash and time using the timings we've scarfed
from the Producer output to time the audio track. Using this method we can
get a whole lot of (as in 30+ hours) very cross-platform compatible
presentations on a CD as long as we keep the MP3 file size down. (16, mono,
16). Output is damned near perfect for our purposes. BUT, it is way, way
time consuming. I figure it's taking at least 5 hours per 45 minute
presentation just to get the initial output into Flash. With a good 30 hours
of material to go, this is becoming nightmarish. If Producer would allow for
output to different formats we'd be in like Flint. Since it doesn't though,
we're stuck looking for a doable work-around.

Any suggestions?

-- Warren K.

--
"Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too
dark to read."
-- Groucho Marx

Remember to remove the "NoSpam" from my return e-mail address before
replying.
 
No takers, eh? I suspected none would pipe up from MS, since it's well-known
how much they value maintaining complete control even at the expense of
customer utility. There really is no reason why Producer for Power Point
couldn't output to more useful formats -- except the MS is too stingy. Hell,
even allowing input of MP3s into PowerPoint instead of limiting to wave
format would essentially solve this problem. As useful as PowerPoint is, it
could be a lot more useful if it made distribution easier. With a bit of
tweaking, PowerPoint could easily be used to distribute lage presentations
in CD format. For us as corporate customers, that means that we could
distill the entire proceedings of a conference into a single CD -- if MS
didn't deliberately hobble the input and output options. Time to seek out
3rd part vendors, I guess. Thanks for Jack Sh@t, MS. Feel free to quote me.



..
 
[CRITICAL UPDATE - Anyone using Office 2003 should install the critical
update as soon as possible. From PowerPoint, choose "Help -> Check for
Updates".]

Hello,

PowerPoint doesn't provide the functionality that you are looking for
(cross-platform distribution of multimedia presentations) although, in
conjunction with Producer for PowerPoint 2003, we can get much closer
(because HTML is a more platform neutral format) while losing some of the
slide show features inherent in PowerPoint.

If you (or anyone else reading this message) think that it's important that
PowerPoint provide this kind of functionality, don't forget to send your
feedback (in YOUR OWN WORDS, please) to Microsoft at:

http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp

As with all product suggestions, it's important that you not just state
your wish but also WHY it is important to you that your product suggestion
be implemented by Microsoft. Microsoft receives thousands of product
suggestions every day and we read each one but, in any given product
development cycle, there are only sufficient resources to address the ones
that are most important to our customers so take the extra time to state
your case as clearly and completely as possible.

IMPORTANT: Each submission should be a single suggestion (not a list of
suggestions).

John Langhans
Microsoft Corporation
Supportability Program Manager
Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows
Microsoft Office Picture Manager for Windows

For FAQ's, highlights and top issues, visit the Microsoft PowerPoint
support center at: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=ppt
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbhowto

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