How to Record PowerPoint

by Ross Tate

I've been asked a few times now about how I made my POPL talk video on my website for my Equality Saturation paper. I put that video up hoping to make my research more accessible, and hoping it would encourage others to make their research more accessible. It only makes sense I also describe how I did it, so the instructions are below. Fortunately the program I used has a 30 day free trial, so you can give it a try before shelling out any cash. I recommend playing with the examples to decide what features you like. Be sure to try all the buttons so you know what options are available.

• Prepare your talk in PowerPoint (2007). If people pull this off for some other program, tell me how, and I'll add it to these instructions.
• If you want your recording to have subtitles, write your script for each slide as the notes for that slide.
• Download and install Camtasia Studio (6). Be sure to enable the Camtasia Studio Add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint during installation. You may also want to let it install the Flash Player so you can preview the videos it produces for websites.
• Open up your presentation in PowerPoint. You'll need a microphone plugged into your computer.
• Go to the Add-Ins tab and click the recording options button in the ribbon. You'll want to set the frame rate to whatever you think appropriate. I used frame rate 10, and my talk is loaded with animations. Looking back, connections are fast enough now that I would up that to 15 or maybe even 30. Also play with the microphone level so it doesn't go into the red when you talk. I turned off mouse cursor recording.
• Once you're ready, press the record button. PowerPoint will go into presentation mode, but Camtasia will be recording your entire display. If you use a widescreen computer, Camtasia will also record the black space that PowerPoint doesn't use. I don't know how to remove this.
• Once you're done, use Camtasia Studio to edit your recording. When Camtasia loads your recording, it should also ask you whether you want to import slide notes as captions. If you do, Camtasia will automatically try to synchronize your script with your presentation by using the slide transitions to know how to time the captions. Don't worry about the project settings at this point.
• If you chose to do captions, you'll want to look through them and clean them up. Click the Captions... button. Camtasia can only show three lines at a time, but you can adjust how many characters fit in each line. You can also remove excessive synchronization points, but I haven't had much luck with adding new synchronization points. Also, in the Options pane near the top, you'll probably want to deactive the Display mode and active the Overlay mode. Overlay mode will allow the user to turn on captions so that they appear translucently over the bottom of the presentation.
• If you want an interactive table of contents, look at the timeline at the bottom of Camtasia's window. One row is called Markers. Camtasia defaults these to your slide titles. You may want to edit the names or add and remove markers. If you're like me, you'll break up a long animation across multiple slides which all look alike, so you'll probably want to remove the markers for all but the first of these slides.
• Now you're finally ready to publish your recording. Click the Produce video as... button. This will bring up the Production Wizard.
• You can choose one of the presets, but for publishing to the web I recommend choosing Custom production settings. I'll assume you're producing something for the web and you've chosen to customize your settings.
• Keep the flash option. Choose whichever additional outputs you like.
• Choose the ExpressShow with TOC template, then Flash options.
• Use the video and audio tabs to configure your recording quality and encoding.
• In the Table of Contents tab, change the Display options setting to Floating. This way the table of contents will stay hidden unless someone clicks the appropriate button in the control bar.
• In the Controls tab, change the About Box Options... to change what people see when they click the info button, or remove the button entirely. I recommend turning off Pause at start, since they already have to click a button just to load the flash player. Also uncheck Allow resizing and Show End Screen.
• Back to the Production Wizard, change the Fit in dimensions to the size you want the flash player to be on your page. You can use the Preview ability in the bottom left to get an idea of what the flash player will turn out as. Focus on the flash player controls and the video and sound quality. The HTML embedding doesn't seem to work too well, so you'll manually tweak that anyways. Once your happy, click Next.
• Edit the video info however you please. You will probably want to leave the Embed Video into HTML box checked.
• The production name will also determine the name of many of the files involved. Although the html and css produced can be changed easily, the other files can be more difficult to change. You will most likely need to hack the html and css to get the desired appearace anyways since Camtasia seems to have some glitches.
• Finally, upload the folder to the website and play with the html and css until the page integrates well with the rest of your site.

I hope that's helpful. Give it a try. Tell me if you make any useful discoveries. I'd also be interested in watching your presentations so send me a link. Thanks for putting your talk online!