Video is hot. Since publishing Don Jones’ ScriptingAnswers.com customer spotlight earlier this month, we’ve gotten tons of great feedback on the excellent job he did in creating the “talking head” presenter video that accompanies many of the slides. Although most of Don’s slides contain static (non-animated) PowerPoint content, we’re also hearing a lot lately that those of you adding video to your Presenter courses and presentations want to know how to synchronize your video with the animations in your slide.
Presenter does not currently support a native method for synchronizing PowerPoint animations with video, as it does for audio (Articulate -> Sync Animation Timings). So how do you get your video to appear synchronized with your slide animations?
First, make sure you’re using Articulate Presenter 5.05, which contains a number of improvements to the Insert Flash Movie feature, including Presenter’s ability to automatically set the slide duration based on that of the movie you’re importing.
Next, proceed with synching your presenter video with your slide animations:
The Click-Marker Video Synchronization Approach
- View your Flash movie in any player (your Web browser, Swiff Player, etc.) and watch the timer.
- As you watch your movie, note the time at which you want each animation in your slide to occur (e.g., 02.74 seconds, 09.34 seconds, etc.).
- Import your Flash movie into PowerPoint via Articulate -> Insert Flash Movie on the slide where you have your animations to synchronize.
- Go to Articulate -> Timeline Audio Editor (you must have the Professional Edition) and select the slide where you have imported your Flash movie. You will likely see a single click marker (C1) on your slide with the animations.
- If desired, click and drag the C1 click marker to the point at which you want your first animation to occur — be sure to account for the 5-second Flash movie buffer (or whatever value you’ve specified) at the start of the slide before the Flash movie begins playing.
- For all other animations you have in the slide, click on the audio track until you find the point at which you want your next animation to occur, then right-click at this point and select the option to Add Click. This will mark the point where your next animation should occur, corresponding to the times you noted in Step 2 above.
- Repeat the previous step for each of the animations in your slide, then close the Timeline Audio Editor, making sure you save your work.
Note: This is not an exact science and results may vary due to bandwidth speed and other factors, especially with larger videos, but it will get you pretty close to synching your presenter video with your slide animations.
Alternate method: Strip your audio track out of your video and import via Articulate Presenter as a .WAV file, then synchronize with animations using the Sync Animation Timings tool. This is not a precise method, either, and may lead to your talking head’s mouth moving separately from the audio — so this method may be more appropriate if your video does not feature a close-up of an individual speaking (perhaps it’s a video demonstration of how to tie a shoe and only shows the shoe, not the person).
Is there a reason why when I put video as a swf file into the presenter panel that the slide does not automatically advance even though it is set that way? It gets to the end of the slider bar and then jumps back in time, and then stops…
When I put the same exact swf file into the slide (not in the presenter panel), it advances just fine…please advise!
Mike Kemmler | Posted at 03:23 pm on April 25th, 2007 | #