I have written a guest post on the GfK Techtalk blog on the many ways in which we are using video in a Market Research and what the future might hold. obviously not given away all the juicy bits but hopefully it’s a good read.
I didn’t realise that this was an unknown to many but often there is a need to pull things out of PowerPoint for alternative uses rather than put them in. This is often the case for me when produce video reports where the findings have been visualised in PowerPoint. So, it’s as simple as this, File > Save As > under the naming form fill change the drop down to png or jpg and hit save, you will then be prompted current slide or every slide, choose every slide and each slide in he deck will be saved as a separate picture or image.
If you just require an element if the slide you can right click and save as image in much the same way.
Top tip,
If your output proposed use is a higher quality than the resolution of the ppt you can often scale up your deck to A3, any vector graphics will be re sized and the quality of the output increased. Go, File > Page Setup and adjust the page accordingly.
You will quickly learn if you are outputting video for a client who is bound to feed back and expect changes to adapt an editing technique that allows you to go back, find footage you might have deleted from the timeline, jump to another camera angle at a certain point or reconnect audio that you had discarded. Often the people making the decisions do not understand the choices you made and insist on something else, for this reason it is important to take a photoshop technique to editing in a way that is non destuctive. Here’s a few tips.
At capture stage be sure not to be too precise with your timecodes, always capture with ample handles and this sometimes means shooting a little more at the begininning and end of each clip, this will not only allow for better constructed transitions but also save the annoyance of not being able to extend the clip that extra little bit to fit to the timing of the edit.
Always keep you original files as raw and unedited as possible. Do not apply effects on the camera or work on the footage in another program and save it down, keep your editing options as versitile as possible.
Re order! Don’t delete! I often shoot a presentation on two cameras and sync the two. If you have made a decision about which camera the viewer will see, keep the unused clip but place it on the layer below in the timeline or on a hidden layer. There’s always some who might say, can we have this camera at this point? Just because they can!
If you are working with graphics then Adobe Premiere Pro is great for importing images or projects both psd’s and aep’s directly in the timeline but be sure when you right click and edit in Photoshop or After Effects you don’t make irreversible changes, always make a backup copy and work in layers so you turn on and off elements at will.
There are many little tips and tricks to speed up your repetitive editing processes but one of the main things I find is to get used to working in numbers for resizing, scaling positioning etc
One of the major pluses to editing using premiere pro is the ability to drag and drop different video formats straight into you project and then on into the timeline, no rendering and no re encoding video to a specific .mov file but this means you’ll often need to re size clips. You can set this to automatic as you bring it into the timeline but I often like to do this manually and refreme the shot too.
I work with a notepad in front of me and any values I think I will repeatedly need in that project I jot down. This is also a good tip for scaling over time, timecodes, clip lengths and color values. It might seem obvious but on a large project it’s amazing the amount of time and frustration it can save. I’ve included a screen grab where you might find this useful in the video effects tab.
Probably the most common problem I am faced with week in week out is video failing to play in a PowerPoint presentation. Here are a few of the checks to perform to get things working.
Firstly, PowerPoint does not physically bring the video file into your presentation as it does an image. Hit save after embedding and notice the PowerPoint file does not grow in memory size. Therefore the presentation always needs to know where the video is relative to the document. Always keep the video file in the same place as the PowerPoint file and get into the habit of moving the parent folder around as you move the presentation from computer to computer.
Secondly, there is a bug in PowerPoint, if you see the white square when you play the video there is a good chance this is caused by there being too many characters in the video file name, I did read somewhere that over 128 characters but I find this differs from machine to machine. If you ate one of those people who put your videos in a folder named movies or something then include this parent folder in this rule.
Lastly, I sometimes get problems when a presentation is built on a company network and again this differs from machine to machine. If the above doesn’t work try moving the presentation to your desktop or local folder and re embedding the video.
That should do it!
Also see Creating Video for Powerpoint and inserting video into Microsoft Powerpoint
This was a request I had recently for a presentation style video. We shot voice overs in the studio and the request was to highlight certain keywords in a paragraph of text in time to the voice over. This is a simple concept but there is an inefficient and an efficient way of going about it.
Lets start by creating your title and finalise your text font and layout. Right click in the Project Pane and select New Item > Title and name accordingly. Pick up the text tool and click where you would like the text to appear in the window. I like to adjust my font, size etc previously and then paste my text in. Refine your layout and the close the window. Now duplicate the title you just created by right clicking and selecting duplicate. I usually name it with a .1 suffix or the word that is will highlight. Open up this title and highlight the first word you wish to appear in a different colour and change the colour. Close this window down and this time duplicate the .1 version of the title. Repeat this until all your words are highlighted in the new colour. Play the voice over in the timeline and pause at the beginning of the first word you wish to be highlighted in the paragraph. Refine using the arrows on your keyboard. Drag the second title you created down to the playhead and repeat until all highlighted words are timed to the VO.
If you are used to using Final Cut Pro you will no doubt prefer to control your audio channels in the timeline rather than on the effects tab. At first this appear difficult if you use the button to the left of the timeline depicted here you shall reveal further controls in Adobe Premiere Pro.
This will allow you to control the levels from the timeline over time which is very handy if you have a soundtrack or voice over that needs to be taken in and out during your edit. Often these level changes will be clip dependent, meaning that if you move the clip around the point at which the levels need to change will remain the same. Sometime these changes in sound level will be relevant to the edit and if you move certain clips you will still require the levels to change at that point. Using the drop down here you have access to show clip toggles or show timeline toggles. Remember that clip levels works on that clips audio independent of the timeline and the timeline audio works on the timeline audio independently of the clips.
Add keyframes at the playhead using the black diamond next to the track or by using the Pen Tool.
This another really simple error that encore throws up every time you check your build unless you manually set it. This error is merely asking what the DVD should do once it has played the video track.
Use the dropdown, End Action to select how it should act, often it will be just Stop or return to the main menu.
Also check out Title Remote Not Set
No doubt you have come across this error many a time when you test your build in Adobe Encore especially if you have sent the project from Premiere Pro via Adobe dynamic link. This is merely the option to select what happens when the viewer presses the menu button on their remote control. If your project looks like the image displayed here then you don’t need to worry just ignore the error as it’s not really an error. I you have a menu on the disc you will need to select the drop down below and point it at your menu. You can pickwick this or select from the drop down.
Also check out End Action Not Set
AVCHD – MPEG4 – AVC/H.264
XP AVC – High Quality
VBR, avaerage of 17Mbps
The manual says,
Approximate recording time 900 minutes on a 120GB HD
My test 10 minute file = 1.28 GB on disk
SP AVC – Normal Quality
VBR, avaerage of 12Mbps
The manual says,
Approximate recording time 1260 minutes on a 120GB HD
My test 10 minute file = 892.1 MB on disk
EP AVC – Long Recording
VBR, avaerage of 5Mbps
The manual says,
Approximate recording time 3000 minutes on a 120GB HD
My test 10 minute file = 348.8 MB on disk
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