Guest Post: Best Ways to Use Presentation Technology, by Jimmy Sturo

Audio Visual Presentations
By Jimmy Sturo

Even the best messages can be ruined by a bad presentation. To get your information across effectively and to generate the right response from your audience, you need to know how to use audiovisual technology to your advantage.

Interested in how to improve your presentation? Read on for some audiovisual presentation dos and don’ts.

Organization is the key. Forget about fancy graphics and sounds; instead, focus on making the flow of your presentation seamless and clear. It’s a good idea to first outline the points you intend to make before you even begin working on the presentation. Identify major themes and ideas so you know what to visually highlight.

Avoid clutter. Fancy animation and sounds are usually unnecessary; oftentimes, these elements only distract from the message instead of contributing to it. Brevity and simplicity work best – the shorter and simpler your messages and manners of delivery are, the more likely they are to be recalled by your audience. Too much clutter diminishes the impact of a good message. Highlight your message and not your graphics, and you will never go wrong.

Consider the physical requirements of the space where you will deliver your presentation. Are you going to use a small and private conference room with just four to five people or a big theater with hundreds in the audience? Are the room’s acoustics decent, or do you need to bring additional speakers to be heard? Is it well lighted? Can you control the lighting to enhance your presentation? You need to answer all these and many other questions in order to design an audiovisual presentation that makes the most out of what the venue has to offer.

Finally, complement your audiovisual presentation with handouts. No matter how effective your presentation, remember that your audience can only remember so much; you need to provide them with follow-through materials like a systematically outlined handout in order for them to truly retain your message. Keep your handouts short and sweet. This way, the reader only sees the most important messages.

Audio Visual provides detailed information on Audio Visual, Audio Visual Equipment, Audio Visual Rentals, Audio Visual Presentations and more. Audio Visual is affiliated with Alpha Numeric Pagers.

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How to Produce a Video on the Cheap. And, Yes, a “Good” Video.

Video is one of those rare fields that has had a total reboot. It has not been supplanted, replaced, superseded, obsoleted, or died.

It flailed for a bit, while the doctors tried to find what about the web made its parents think it was going to die.

But then Dr. House entered, and declared, “Ahah! It isn’t dying. It is being reborn!”

And it was reborn, in short pants. Younger, leaner, easier to maintain (not as fussy about it’s baby food) and requiring far fewer oil changes.

Have I mixed enough metaphors?

The new video was born of a demand caused by the Internet, and it wasn’t always called video. Sometimes it was “Powerpoints,” or “Decks”, or “Flash shows”, or “Streaming” video. But those were just designer labels.

Wrangler or Dior, it just doesn’t cost as much to make a video, if you do it right.

You will always pay for brains. The theme. The premise. The strategy. the script. (Uh, that’s what I sell, folks.)

But when you can get a high-def camera for 250 bucks, and a a damn good editing program for 100 bucks, and a powerhouse computer off-lease at some corporate slag-heap for practically free—- well now all that matters is that you know what to do with all this firepower.

My advice is go to the best video writer / director in town and yell him you know the secret handshake and get him to work on the cheap. He may just be glad to have the business.

But barring that, and assuming your ego wants to be a part of the wonderful world of video, here’s a few ways to produce a perfectly acceptable video on the cheap.

Start by making a slide show (for more on this, go to my other website, slideshowsecrets.com.) A good slideshow has compelling still images, the occasional graphic sequence, and a great soundtrack. The secret sauce is the soundtrack. There are terrific slide show programs available like ProShow Gold from Photodex for Windows and FotoMagico for the Mac that create incredible moving still image shows that sync precisely to pre-existing soundtracks that output to video and thus create, well, video. They can upload to YouTube, your own hosted site, to a DVD, flash drive, etc.

If you’d like to be working with full motion (more precisely, if you NEED to work with full motion– to show a motion process, to use interviews that MUST be on-camera) there are terrific low-rent video editing programs on both the MAC and PC sides.

For Windows, you can’t go wrong with any of the Sony Vegas family. These allow you to mix stills, motion, graphics, and create a fully sophisticiated soundtrack all within one program. We at VideoStory have used the pro version for years.

On the MAC side, Try combining the iLife and iWork products to create a hell of an arsenal. iMovie 9 allows for simple, intuitive editing. By using the presentation program Keynote for graphcs and effects and outputting to Quicktime for inclusion in your video edit, you’ve just upped the quality quotient by 10. (Please, please, do not tell any professionals I told this to you.)

A lot of these secrets can be found in my new book. “Tribute Videos for Love & Money”, which explores ways talented people with limited knowledge and resources can make great videos. If you’d like a free pre-release copy, just email me at brienlee@slideshowsecrets.com and I will send you a free complete PDF of the book in exchange for your email address for my newsletter. It’s worth it. It’s free.

Tribute Example 1: Family History

This family history DVD  was created as a Christmas gift from parents to their sons and daughter and their childrens’ children. What an amazing and thoughtful gift. While it preserves photos and especially 8mm films that had not been seen in decades, the larger story is the interviews from the parents that pepper the story. This excerpt hopefully will give you the flavor of a compelling, lasting keepsake not possible in any other way.

REVIEW: One True Media– On-Line Slide Show Builder

I was updating this blog– adding "widgets"– and noticed something called "One True Media". Enticed by the ostentatiousness  of the name, I decided to try it out.

It’s an online "slideshow" and "montage" maker. A slideshow is defined as a series of images with no sound but lots of weird backgrounds and stylesets;l a montage is a slide-sound show with effects, music, and is timed– to an extent– to the music.

I have strong opinions as to what makes a real slide-sound show, and while this isn’t quite it, it is the first on-line offering that seems to get some of the sync-sound concept. (Go to SLIDE-SOUND.COM for more of my thoughts on this.)

It begins with uploading a slew of pictures. I uploaded 100, but there is a limit. My pictures had been "webified" so many were not as good a resolution as the system prefers. (You’ll see graininess in the sample, but I think that’s the fault of low-res pictures.)

Once the pictures are uploaded, you can slip and slide them in order. Then you decide whether you’re making a slide show or montage (which is my idea of a slide show.)

For each image you can specify zoom or no zoom, zoom direction, and a transition between images. You can choose the length of time the image is on the screen, and the length of the transition. This can be wholesale for the whole batch, or one at a time.

Now, the sound part. You don’t upload music. You choose it. You choose from various decent compositions done in a variety of styles by beat, genre, or type (wedding, anniversary, business, etc.) You can choose well-known pop songs which are rerecording of hits (so that OTM only pays for the composition, not the performance. This is a premium feature– more on that later.)

Choose as many songs as you need, order them, and then pick on which slide you want that song to end. The system assumes that the next song in your playlist will start with the next slide. Repeat, and when you tell the last cut to end on the last slide, you’re done.

One True Media is free with a limited feature set- no text, no pop songs, only three songs per montage, no downloading of your montage (you can share it on their sight or embed it on yours.)

For $3.99 a month you get those extras, plus extra themes, transitions, effects, etc.

Here’s my masterpiece:

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Plusses: Easy, fast, free, some sync to sound possible.
Minuses: No uploading of voice or music; limited timing options, must upgrade to download shows, use pop songs, access more special effects and transitions