Saturday, April 17, 2010

Small Business DIY: Convert PowerPoint to Video

Over the course of the past year, while we built and launched Woubie, we learned how to do a lot of things ourselves. If you're a small business owner or self-employed, you understand how important it is to save money by doing as much as you can yourself. We thought it might be fun to share some of what we've learned, so this is the first of our Small Business DIY series.

The most recent trick we learned is how to convert a PowerPoint presentation into a video that you can upload to sharing sites like YouTube & Vimeo and then embed in your web site. Social Media is a great tool for small businesses and it seems that people find it hard to resist at least checking out a video. They're much more likely to watch a short video, even if it's just images & music, than they are to read a whole page describing your product or service.

But making a video can be a daunting task. So we started searching for an alternative and found out that you can create a PowerPoint presentation, complete with animation, and then convert it to video. Here's the first one we made; it took about 2 days to make, mostly because we tested different conversion programs. In the end it cost us nothing except our time.



Here are the basic steps to doing it yourself:

1) Create a PowerPoint presentation around 10 slides long. You don't want the video to be too long & free video converters may limit the number of slides that can be converted per video. It's a good idea to create just two or three slides and convert it to video, so you can see how text looks. we didn't do that and we wound up having to redo the whole presentation because our original text was way too small.
2) Add animation (if you want to). The more animation you add, the bigger the file will be, so keep in mind that you don't want to overdo it.
3) Once you have it ready, time the slide show. If you don't have a stopwatch, use http://www.online-stopwatch.com/.
4) We didn't do a voice recording for our first one; we simply found some open source music that we liked. One of the places you can find out-of-copyright sound recordings is http://www.openmusicarchive.org/ .
5) If the music you found is too short and you want to either loop it or merge two different songs into one MP3, you can download a free MP3 merging program that makes it simple to select two MP3s and merge them into one. The idea is to have a sound file that is about the same length (maybe a few seconds longer) than your slide presentation.
6) After trying several different video converters, the one that worked the best for us was E.M. PowerPoint Video Converter. They have a free version that limits you to 10 slides, but it did a great job and the resulting video was cleaner and clearer than some of the others. The program is easy to use and you can simply select your PPT file, your sound file and click Convert. You have a choice of AVI file or MPG. We tried both and the AVI file was better for us.
7) Upload your file to a video sharing site, such as YouTube. If you don't have an account, it's simple and easy to create one. Once you've uploaded it, you or you webmaster can easily take the code they provide for embedding and insert it into your web site or blog.

You can see what the above video looks like on our web site here: http://www.woubie.com/WoubieSite/ProductPage.asp and how it looks on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gvbPAME0L8.

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