Article of the Month

Beyond PowerPoint

Making movies for business and pleasure: PART ONE | PART TWO

Last month, we shared both our frustration and our fascination with the challenges of creating digital video productions for distribution on DVD. The frustration is with trying to use PowerPoint for this task; the satisfaction is in finding other software that does the job better.

To recap, here are the deficiencies that sent us looking beyond PowerPoint:

Unreliable synchronization of music to imagery
No support for fading an audio clip
Inconvenient handling of photos
Limited support for playing video
Poor timeline
Inability to combine or script zooming and panning

And we found two programs, Pro Show Producer from Photodex and Adobe’s Premiere Elements, that together cover off practically every requirement that we defined:

External referencing of photos: Instead of trying to import and digest megabytes worth of imagery, these programs store references to the external files. Any changes made to the source files are instantly reflected in the project, and you needn’t worry about loss of resolution or downsampling the photos first to keep file sizes down.
Complete audio-video synchronization: No matter where you are in a movie’s timeline, you can confidently match an audio clip to the imagery behind it. If you want to cut to the Niagara Falls panorama right at the crescendo of Beethoven’s Fifth or when Kelly Clarkson hits a high note, that’s no problem, and you can test it by playing just that slide (in PowerPoint, you would have to start the slide show on the first slide that the music begins on in order to even hear the music).
Built-in facilities for editing audio: PowerPoint requires that you edit your audio clip before importing it. Most, if not all, digital video software allows you to fade in or out imported audio, making it much easier to refine your timings.
Support for video: These programs make very little distinction between still photos and motion video. If it’s a standard format, like TIF, BMP, JPG, AVI, MPG, WMV, they will accept the file and play the file.
Direct export to most standard video formats and built-in DVD creation.

You can read the first installment in our Editorial Archive. Here is an overview of a typical workflow for a project that will result in a DVD with photos and video footage set to music.

Step One: Create a Project Folder

Because advanced video creation software uses media by reference (instead of trying to import it), it is essential that you organize your work diligently. This isn’t hard to do, just easily overlooked. On our system, Drive G is where we create our videos, and for a project like a promo for a seminar, we recommend the simple folder structure shown in Figure 1: a folder for audio clips, one for video footage, one for photos and other still images, and one for any handiwork needed in an image-editing or drawing program (i.e., if you needed to create a complex transparency in Photoshop or a powerclip in CorelDraw, the result would go in the images folder, but the native application file would be stored in the work folder).

Step Two: Create Video Footage First

Motion video requires more pre-production work than still photos so our best advice is to take care of it first if your project has any. We find the $99 Premiere Elements a handy one-stop shop for capturing video from Firewire or USB sources, trimming and editing, adding transitions, and tweaking audio. Export all video clips as uncompressed AVI files – 720 x 480 resolution (if in North America or another NTSC country; 720 x 576 if in a country that uses the PAL standard), 29.97 frames per second, full RGB color palette, and audio set at 16-bit, 48,000 Hz (CD quality).

These settings imply two things: 1) you will have tremendous flexibility to use this video, able to place it in high-fidelity projects or downsample it for delivery across the web; and 2) it will take up gobs of hard drive space, about 100MB for 30 seconds of video. If your work involves motion video, get used to the fact that you will need a much larger hard drive.

It is likely that the video you capture with Premiere will be in AVI format, and if you follow our recommendation, you will be exporting your final clips in AVI format. Therefore, you will want a naming scheme that enables you to keep this all straight, and possibly one additional folder in addition to video clips: raw or captured footage.

Step Three: Begin Assembly

Let the creativity begin! Here is where you assemble all of the pieces, creating meaningful imagery, evocative integration of sound and music, and elegant transitions between passages. While we are using Pro Show Producer as our grand central station software, these steps are generic enough to be applicable to other programs, as well. And if you want to follow along, you can do so with the free trial version available at the Photodex website.

Our first idea is to begin with an abstract photo that gradually morphs into a literal one. We took the photo into Corel PhotoPaint and applied the “sketchpad” filter to it. We created one with soft lines and one with a more defined outline. Figure 2 shows the two abstracts and the original photo staged on PSP’s timeline. The top-left window is a simple window for browsing folders while the file window below that shows the files in the selected folder. Note the three files with checkmarks, indicating their inclusion in the slide show. In the timeline, the AB icons indicate a fade transition between the two photos with a three-second duration.

We could probably leave these three photos as is and have an effective intro to the slide show, but few things create energy more than simple motion. Adding a pan effect to a photo is many times easier than it is in PowerPoint – you double-click the photo and work a simple dialog box, either numerically or visually, to adjust pan, zoom, and rotation. However, we are creating a pan across three photos, so we need to make sure that as one photo fades into another, the pan of the second photo picks up where the first one left off. Figure 3 shows the Motion and Effects dialog box, from which synchronizing the panning of these three photos took about five minutes.

Step Four: Lay Down Audio

PSP only has one audio track but also allows you to apply audio to any slide, allowing for simple voice-overs. We found a two-minute copyright-free audio clip of up-tempo instrumental modern music to use as the background sound track. Placing it is as simple as finding it in the audio folder and dragging it to the timeline. We then added a blank slide to the beginning, so the first image could fade in.

Step Five: Create!

Now for the grist of the slide show: a series of photos, each one with a subtle zoom and/or pan, persisting on screen for four seconds, and then softly fading into the next one. Commonly referred to as the “Ken Burns” effect—in honor of the noted documentarian who first employed the effect—the only way you can go wrong with this type of transition is if you try to zoom a very long way in a short period or if you yo-yo your audience with a zoom-in, followed by a zoom-out, then a zoom-in, etc.

Figure 4 shows Slide 11 in the operating room. Across an eight-second span, this photo will zoom in and pan to the right far enough to remove the woman from view entirely. This is a technique that we employ often when we want a backdrop for other images – this coastline will now serve as a background for our video clips.

Figure 5 shows the ability of Pro Show Producer (but not Gold or the lighter versions) to overlay one image atop another. This is the first of five elements that will gradually work their way from left to right. The first two are video clips with their own audio tracks, and PSP will automatically lower the level of the main audio track when they play.

By tweaking the durations of the slides and their transitions, it is quite simple to end the slide show precisely when the audio track ends. Of course, you could just fade the audio so it would fit in any duration, but that doesn’t exactly allow for a dramatic or a flashy ending. With the cool photo of a personalized license plate (a Honda coupe sporting PPT Diva), it was an ideal opportunity to end the show on the strong up-beat that ends the audio track.

This two-minute video is eminently distributable, in the following ways:

By burning a video CD or DVD, that will play on any PC running a Windows or Mac OS, and on about 98% of all DVD players in circulation today.
As a simple executable file which will play on any Windows PC. You can see how low-maintenance that is by downloading www.altman.com/2007/2007.exe.
As a heavily-compressed video distributed via email.
As a stand-alone AVI, WMV, or MPG file that can be incorporated into other projects.
As specialty video files that can be played on video-capable iPods, Palm handhelds, or mobile phones.

Our Toolbox

In addition to the two main programs described here, we have benefited from the following utility programs:

SNAG-IT: No self-respecting software trainer can get by without the ability to capture screen images or create video of a program being driven, and Snag-It from TechSmith is our choice. www.techsmith.com

KINOMA PRODUCER: To create videos in unusual formats, like for an iPod or a Palm, you need an intelligent video encoder. This handy suite from Kinoma does just that, and for a very friendly price of just $30. Output on our Treo 650 is remarkably sharp, good enough for us to use to show videos to prospective clients without having to schlep our notebook PC around. www.kinoma.com

AUDACITY: An excellent wave file editor, and completely free. http://audacity.sourceforge.net

ANY SOUND RECORDER: Little is more frustrating than buying a song from iTunes and then not being able to use it in a slide show, where a Wave or MP3 file format is required. This affordable program records anything your sound card plays, including iTunes songs, and lets you save it as a CD-quality Wave file. We wrote about this in March and you can find it in our Editorial Archive. http://www.any-sound-recorder.com

ACDSee Photo Manager: Sifting through hundreds of digital photos requires a powerful organizing and viewing tool and this is the one we have chosen for the past three years. www.acdsystems.com

CorelDraw Graphics Suite: For a fraction of the price of Adobe Photoshop, you get an excellent image-editing program and a best-of-breed vector drawing program. The perfect creative suite for digital movie makers. www.corel.com

June 2006