This past weekend, my brother came over and I am going to try to help him with a work project. It might end up being like a power point presentation/ slide show, with music and we may record him reading the script for [announcer voice over].So the unique part of their project was that it is essentially a slide show with continuous narration. The following was edited from my response:
WHAT KIND OF PRESENTATION, LIVE OR KIOSK?
Is the presentation NOT accompanying a live presenter (i.e., your brother)? Will it play unattended, like video? Will it play on a computer, or do you intend to play back on tape or DVD?
Assuming there's a live presenter, you'll need some kind of interactive control of the playback. This is what presentation software is made to do, and those solutions (following) would be more appropriate. It can be tricky to synchronize a voice track with pictures in presentation software, although they do have support to "time" presentations for a live speaker.
If it's really more like a "kiosk"-style unattended presentation, to be viewed as a "movie," and contained more complex elements than pages of text, I'd lean toward doing this as a video production. Presentation software (PowerPoint and Keynote, for example) can typically generate movies as an optional feature. But again, timing the transitions to the voice track might be tricky.
I just tried recording a narration within PowerPoint while watching an existing presentation. I narrated, and changed slides while I narrated. When I played back the slide show, PowerPoint truncated my narration at every slide transition, as though it were "rounding off" times to whole seconds. If i'd made a transition while talking, it just cut me off to start the next slide's narration. STUPID! Over the years, both Word and PowerPoint have gotten so rife with "helpful" features that it's nearly impossible to get what *I* want the programs to do. They just "automatically" make decisions like this one. Apple's Keynote (at least, not the somewhat earlier version I have) doesn't support recording narrations within the program, but allows you to drop audio files on each slide. This is also an awkward process for a fully narrated, self-contained presentation. So if you want something like a movie, make it with a video editor, but probably NOT iMovie (more below).
Does Mac have a power point program? And if so, what is it called? And would it already be on my mac?
PRESENTATION SOFTWARE
First of all, Microsoft PowerPoint is available for Macintosh (PowerPoint debuted as a Macintosh-only program in 1987 - the Windows version appeared in 1990). It's currently part of Microsoft Office for Mac 2004. You can buy it from Apple, but it's cheaper at Amazon. As the name implies, it's been a while since Microsoft updated this suite - but a "Universal Binary" version which will run on both PowerPC Macs (like yours) and the new Intel-powered Macs is due soon - I'd guess early 2007. You'll probably qualify for a free or inexpensive upgrade when it releases if you buy Office now. I've stopped using most of Microsoft Office, with the exception of Excel. I've never been a PowerPoint user and Word's just gotten stupid over the years. But (my wife) uses PowerPoint (one key feature keeps us from transitioning to Apple's Keynote - "drawing" over the presentation live while presenting) and has to work with and submit Word files with co-workers, so we keep current versions of Office. Her school district has some licensing arrangement (a clever part of Microsoft's Plan of Domination in which everyone eventually *has* to use Office - but see "OpenOffice.org" below for a solution to that) which allows us to buy Office for a token amount, so at least I don't have to gripe about paying for it.
Apple's presentation software is called Keynote, and it is sold as part of Apple's iWork software suite - along with Pages, a page-layout program. iWork costs $79 retail, but you could but it as a staff member of GDS at the educational price of $49. Both Keynote and Pages are very slick - you'll recognize interface elements from iMovie and iDVD, including a Media Browser that lets you peruse your iPhoto and iTunes libraries for images and sounds to include in your document. Keynote can import and export PowerPoint-compatible files, and it can save files it's own file format (with non-PowerPoint features).
AN OPEN-SOURCE OFFICE SUITE
You should also know about the open-source project OpenOffice.org. This elaborate and ongoing project maintains a cross-platform suite of programs that emulates the functionality of Microsoft Office. Users of just about every operating system in use today can download a free set of programs that are transparently compatible with Microsoft Office, both reading and writing Office files. It's not the easiest thing to install on a Mac, as it may require you to install the "X11 environment." This is actually a Unix GUI (Graphical User Interface - a way of representing files and directories with pretty icons - like the Mac OS or Windows). You may already have X11 installed if your computer came with OS 10.4 and not 10.3. Otherwise you'd have to install it from the OS 10.4 installer DVD. (If "X11" or "X11.app" is in your
Truly, just getting a real presentation program might be the easiest path, if the presentation is typical of a "PowerPoint" project: "slides" with intermittent graphics and mostly bulleted text. Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote or OpenOffice's "Impress" module will all do this.
I was thinking if we had the graphics or pictures, then I could just put them on the time line and cross dissolve between them in iMovie.
That's a legitimate solution, depending upon what the presentation needs to do. If you want to do that *without* real presentation software, and use video-editing tools, you'd probably want something other than iMovie (which has really poor text editing tools). (See next entry)
Postscript: She did end up doing the project in iMovie. It was the application with which she was most familiar, and (I didn't yet know) the projects was in fact a running narration to which still images with captions needed to be synchronized. This would be very awkward in presentation software, and (especially for both of us, who have been video editors) an appropriate strategy for a video editing application.
Question 2. OK, if I were going to build a graphic at the TV station. I would have a background. Then I would use the [$750K digital effects device] to shrink the video and place it in the lower left corner. Then I would add [text from a $150K character generator] in the upper right hand corner.
Is there a way to do this on my mac? Sorry, this is probably not a simple question.
MOVING UP FROM IMOVIE
Even though there are third-party add-on software tools that would allow you to do this kind of thing in iMovie, it probably doesn't make sense to spend money in this way. You can buy Apple's Final Cut Express HD for $149 educational ($299 retail). This is a subset of their Final Cut Pro HD video editing application (FCP is now only available as part of Final Cut Studio), designed for users who have production needs that exceed iMovie, and pretty much exactly what you'd want.
You already have models for what you'd like to do from working in a real television production environment - with Final Cut Express you'd be able to realize pretty much anything you'd have done at [our old TV station], and some things that were just impossible (like compositing dozens of layers of elements with no generational loss). It's probably not as *easy* to do things as at [the TV station], but it's more important that you know what you're trying to achieve - at least you'll know what you're looking for.
(Don't let the "HD" part scare you - iMovie, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro now all support the consumer HDV high-definition format, as well as its 16:9 aspect ratio, but they still work with the same DV format digital video and 4:3 aspect ratio in which you've already produced projects.)
Final Cut Studio is probably more than you'll want to tackle. It's more expensive ($699 educational, $1,299 retail), and its DVD Studio Pro and Motion applications have spectacularly steep learning curves. Motion won't even run on your Mac - we had to buy a meaner video card for our fastest Macintosh just to install it.
Final Cut Express does have a text tool, allowing you to create, position and manipulate text over time (using a keyframe paradigm). It's not perfect, but it's usable.
RASTER IMAGE EDITING
To *really* exercise control of the appearance of text with still images, one needs some kind of raster-image editor. The ubiquitous image-editing tool is Adobe Photoshop - but here again, this is an expensive application - typically around $600 retail. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a "light" version of Photoshop, and Amazon sells it for $72. A current $20 rebate knocks that down to $52.
The open-source community has also provided a Photoshop replacement called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). Again, it requires the X11 app to run the Macintosh version of GIMP. GIMP (like Photoshop) is a very deep program, and the learning curve is steep. Also, GIMP has a rather un-Mac like interface, so that's another learning hurdle. But it's free, and very powerful.
CONCLUSIONS
If someone will be speaking live, and manually advancing through a presentation, you need either Microsoft Office or Apple Keynote (part of iWork).
If the project is self-contained and can run as a movie from a computer, VCR or DVD, I think the one thing you should do is buy Final Cut Express HD. You're probably wanting several other features this brings you (how about bluescreen/greenscreen?) that iMovie has not been able to do. There's a lot to learn, and it's not similar to iMovie, but I think you'll appreciate having better production tools.
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