Excuse me while I whine about software... :(

[usernamenumber]

I have been experimenting with using presentation software for parts of the training modules I create at work. In general, I am not a fan of slideshows for delivering courses (which may surprise those familiar with my work at Red Hat), but I've been basically using them as tools for creating simple animations very quickly, and for that, they're actually quite good. Unlike with "real" animation tools (at least the few with which I'm familiar), it's nice to be able to divide the work into discrete chunks (slides).

Then again, maybe it's time for me to accept that I'm not using these presentation tools for their intended purpose. And yet... they're so... close. I tweeted the other day something to the effect of "do you ever wish you could squish two applications together to get the one you actually wish you were using?". This is what I was talking about:

PowerPoint saves slide narrations in a (relatively) sane way, such that if I need to re-record a slide I can re-record just that slide. This is great for canned training, allowing me to quickly and easily update a specific chunk of my presentation without re-doing the entire thing.

...but it doesn't have any kind of meaningful "Save as Movie" functionality, begging the question of why I would include narration, unless I'm expecting anyone who wants to view my presentation to download it, fire up PowerPoint and press Play first.

Apple Keynote can export to .mov, which can easily be converted to .mp4 and/or .ogv for embedding in a website.

...but when you record narration in Keynote, it appears to just create one long audio file. You don't have to start over at the beginning to change something, but if you re-record one slide you then have to re-record everything after it.

It's like MS and Apple are tossing the smartbrain back and forth between them, resulting in two products, each of which has half of a sane workflow.

And while Keynote claims to be able to import/export PowerPoint files... no. Don't even get me started on all of the incompatibilities there.

In short: I think I'm going to cry. So instead of crying I'll whine on the Internet. And maybe also cry.

If someone has suggestions for software that is...

• Able to create simple animations (objects and text move around, fade in/out, etc)


• Add narration in a way that makes it easy to re-record discrete chunks


• Ideally store the script for said narration in the animation file


• Relatively easy to pick up


• Free/cheap

...then by all means, pitch it to me.

Comments

[sandrylene.livejournal.com]

Sadface. Adobe Captivate would be really useful to you, I suspect, but is definitely not cheap.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've looked into it before, and from what I've seen it could be exactly what I want. Work would probably pay for it, too, if I asked. If the proofs-of-concept I'm working on now pan out, and I don't find a better option, I may do just that.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

I just... I already have these tools, and they look like they're supposed to do what I want, but those parts just don't seem to have been designed well. *sigh* /whine

[sandrylene.livejournal.com]

Yeeaaahhh, I don't know why PowerPoint doesn't do its logical extrapolation, and all I can really do is be sympathetic at you.

[laurion]

That's what I was going to suggest as well.

Maybe you could record a series of mini movies, one for each slide, and then when it is all good, join them up? Extra work, but might do what you want.

I've just downloaded an iPad app called 'Explain Everything', and if it does anything like this, I'll let you know. SonicPics seems to be the other suggested one for the iPad, but that does no animation at all, just an image slideshow.

[heiligekuh.livejournal.com]

When students do this style of project, I have them export the visually keynote as a movie, sometimes with a rough draft of the narration.

Then they import the .mov into iMovie, where the incremental voiceover tools are far, far superior. In that they exist.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

Doesn't address (as far as I can tell) the most common scenario I'm trying to deal with, where I need to correct something in the text of a slide, and adjust the narration to match. iMovie might let me re-record a specific chunk of the narration, but it sounds like I'd have to record/export/import the presentation into iMovie all over again, and that's not even starting on the issue of timing narration to a pre-recorded presentation.

...right?

[heiligekuh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's right. It's one of the reasons that I specified that this was students' process. Even for longer projects, they have a clean and final due date in 90% of cases. So they'll work on the animation/slide stuff, plan and revise their narration, but only do the combination once at the very end.

School, sadly, doesn't often put a "completed" project into an ongoing cycle of tweaks and revisions.

Not knowing what the animation or narration is like in your work, I'm not sure if my work flow suggestions will be helpful at all. BUT! I am a pretentious technocrat, sure that my privileged experience will provide the answer to everyone's problems. If I may nerd-splain some more..

If I had 100 slides with complicated animations, I'd make do with the Keynote->iMovie export on a weekly-revised project. I'd try to make a "base" iMovie that contained the narration, so that when I imported a revised visual, I could just slide the audio clips around, splicing new bits in or out.

if it was longer than 100 slides (or 15 minutes), I'd probably try to break it down into separate Keynote files and possibly separate iMovie projects. That way I could limit how much I'd have to resync for a given change. Of course, that just means that every batch of changes would inevitably involve something every 9 minutes, just to get maximum annoyance coverage.

[khyros.livejournal.com]

Powerpoint doesn't have save as movie? I feel like I've done that Regardless you could also camtasia the powerpoint presentation and then use camtasia's super simple NLE for replaceing chunks if you need to. Camtasia for mac is pretty cheap.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

Well... sort of. The Mac version (and only the Mac version) does have a "Save as Movie" option... which creates a .mov with no sound. I checked, and that's not a bug, they apparently just didn't think that was important. My desk still has a head-shaped dent in it.

From what I was able to tell, the MS-approved workaround is to basically do what you suggest, and I did that for one of my videos, but I'm looking for something... better. Which probably means "buy Captivate, or some other application that's actually designed to do what you want".

[khyros.livejournal.com]

We tried Captivate about a year ago and its export movie/flv was buggy. In theory, it SHOULD do everything you're talking about though. Would be curious to learn how it's working nowadays.

That being said, unless you're leveraging some of the cooler interactive shit you can do, taking into account learning curve, I don't know if that will be less work/time intensive than PPT + Camtasia.

Regardless, sympathy on the lack of something what just works cause there durn well should be.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

Hmm....

So, suppose I need to make a small change to both a slide and its narration in the middle of the presentation. Tell me more about CT's "super simple NLE"... you're saying it would be relatively trivial for me to record myself presenting just that slide, and then drop it into an earlier version of the recording, over the footage of the previous version of just that slide?

[khyros.livejournal.com]

Precisely. Camtasia projects are timeline based like premiere/FCP. -- so you could reopen the project. rerecord just the slide you want (so that the recordings are all attached to the project as assets), quickly cut out the old slide, and drag and drop the new slide recording in.


Only 99 bucks, and 30 day free trial unless they've changed their policy. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasiamac1.html?gclid=CODmtOLPm7ACFUSK4AodNEK6ag

[heiligekuh.livejournal.com]

To be fair, that's exactly how iMovie works. I use Camtasia and iMovie extensively, and this isn't a distinction between them. I find Camtasia way better for screencapturing, especially with the dynamic focus options. But when it comes to slice and replacing chunks of a movie, I actually prefer iMovie's clip library.

I wish iMovie still used the sensible CMD-T for splitting clips (which Camtasia still uses) instead of CMD-SHIFT-S.

Would a small vid of this process help make it clear?

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

I've used iMovie enough that I'm confident I could do it. It just seems a bit... cumbersome for the job, but maybe I'm not being fair to it (import/export always feels extra-slow in it, for me). Since I've already got it installed I might as well give it due consideration, I guess.

[heiligekuh.livejournal.com]

iMovie export *does* seem slow! It's especially striking when exporting and uploading to Vimeo seems to take less time than the same quality export to .mov.