Written by Dick CarlsonIf you want to make a short audio file easily available to lots of learners, a great way (strangely enough) is to create a video file that you post directly to YouTube.com. Not very intuitive, but it’s one of the best ways to be sure that nearly anyone can manage to download and consume your content.
I’ve found a quick and inexpensive way to do this is using PowerPoint. Also pretty non-intuitive. I was presenting to a great bunch of trainers the other day, and mentioned the idea — so now I have to actually tell people how to make it work.
A COMPLETELY FREE METHOD
Step One: Create A One-Slide PowerPoint Deck
Make a single slide deck, and use SlideShow/RecordNarration to record your audio. (Or record it with another tool, if you know how to manage that.)
Step Two: Save Slide As JPG
Do a “save as” using the .jpg option, which will create a .jpg image of your single slide.
Step Three: Save PPT As Web Page
Do a “save as web page” and you’ll find the audio file as a little .wav file
Step Four: Open Windows Movie Maker
Import the single .jpg image and the audio file to timeline (If you can’t find Movie Maker in programs — search your c: drive for “moviemk.exe”)
Step Five: Finish the movie as a .wmv file
Finish the movie to your computer, then upload to YouTube.
==========================================
The first time you do this, it may take an hour and you may tear your hair out. By the fifth time, it will be less than five minutes.
If you have more money than time, there are a whole bunch of little apps online that will take the PPT deck with the audio and do it for you.
(There are, of course, many other ways to do this — using recording software like Audacity or Audition, using video software like Final Cut or Premiere, or hiring George Lucas and a bunch of offshore animators. I was just talking about something very quick and dirty that would get the job done.)
If you give it a try, leave a note in the comments and let me know where I went wrong.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Dick,
I think you are right, but you forget one thing, in your first method, you cannot remain your anmations and sounds in your PowerPoint, right?
But the Progam PPT to Video can!
Judith –
Right you are — the goal here was to get a simple audio file out to your learners, so there’s no provision at all to send animations of any kind. There are several nice programs that take PPT files and port animations and all the effects (including transitions and audio) out to the web.
I usually choose to export to Flash (or a .flv file) rather than video in that case — the files are smaller, seem to run better, and more people are successful at getting them to function across a variety of platforms.
Hi Dick
Great article :-). One point: if you tick the ‘link narrations in’ box in the record narration dialogue box you can skip step 3…
Lucy
Lucy –
Thanks! Great idea — I took a look at your site and really loved the tutorial on how to make two things appear at once in PPT. Great example of something I’ve seen but never managed to figure out.
It’s my pleasure
Lucy