technical tips for zoom production

The reversed zoom idea depends in part on the labors of prior preparation of the participants. The general rule is to produce, publish, and circulate materials before the actual event so that participants can review ideas beforehand and come to the event ready to discuss issues. By now, most academics have become familiar with on-line sharing through Zoom, Webex, or other platforms, but there are still details that must be mastered to make a session flow smoothly. This guide covers most of what should be known to insure a free-flowing session, devoted more to conversation than presentation.

from powerpoint or keynote

Creating a permanent archive of a presentation on YouTube is quite easy. The benefits are considerable. You have a permanent archive that can be visited by your audience(s) at their leisure and at their own pace. You can tweak it over time. YouTube will compress your file for you so that you can download a smaller file for use elsewhere. You can present your work to a conference audience beforehand so that there can be more time for discussion at the live event. Producing a video podcast requires no special skills, but it can become very sophisticated as you learn to use special effects.

Minimalist

By far the simplest, most stripped-down method of producing a video for Zoom presentations or YouTube podcasts is this: (1) Prepare you slides so that you can control the timing from one slide to another; (2) prepare your script, if you want to be precise about what you’re saying, or skip this if you like to add comments as you proceed through your slide show. Open up a new zoom session, with only one participant (you, of course). Record the session. To start your slide show, share the screen and advance through the slides while delivering your presentation, with extemporaneous comments or by reading from notes. End the recording and store to a local folder or, if you have a registered account, you can store the file on the Zoom cloud. Zoom will compress the file for you and you can use the video–audio file to upload to YouTube or at a Zoom event. It won’t be easy to distinguish your recorded session from the live session, but you will be able to review the presentation in advance.

Keynote or PowerPoint?

Whether you use Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote, the option to “Save As” is the same. You can create a video version of your usual presentation in a .mov or .m4v video format, either of which is accepted for uploading by YouTube. Under the File menu, select “Export” and choose the format you prefer. Generally, I use .m4v, using the file size of 740 dpi, which looks OK on the Internet. The file size may be large, but YouTube doesn’t mind. It will compress the file for you, so that if you get it back (download) it will be returned to you in a smaller file size.

Adding Sound

Use a simple sound editor to create sound tracks for each slide (recommended) or for the entire saved video file (requires video editing software). I suggest using Audacity, free sound editing software available at https://www.audacityteam.org. You may need to look at the Sound Settings for your computer to make sure your inputs and outputs are set up to use with Audacity. You may need an external microphone, but in general, most recent laptops have good ones. You will not need headphones.

Test the levels of your chosen microphone, then speak your narrative or read from a script. I put the windows of Audacity and Pages on the same screen so I can operate the controls for recording and see my script as well. I try to keep the narrative for each slide under 2 minutes, around 260 words.

To keep sound levels consistent, use NORMALIZE under the EFFECTS pull-down menu. Then save the file as an .mp3 file in a folder that you can conveniently access. Add each slide-numbered audio file to your slide, usually by using an INSERT>AUDIO>AUDIO FROM FILE command from pull-down menus. It’s also possible to skip the editing step and record directly “into” the slide, but this can’t be edited easily, and if you have a slip-of-the-tongue you will have to start over. In Audacity, use the space bar to stop recording, erase the error, and start recording from the new end of the file. Then normalize. Then “save as.”

Timings

A basic PowerPoint or Keynote presentation is just a series of images and texts. Most users do not advance beyond using slides statically, without any “builds” or animations. In that case, each slide will be the duration of your narration without any timing issues. If, however, you are able to learn how to animate figures and drawings, present text sequentially, or layer graphics using build-ins and build-outs, you will want to time these to fit within the duration of your voice-over. Although there are precise techniques for making sure that visual effects happen at some exact point in the audio, it is easier in the long run to have latitude in the timing to avoid the tedium of adding time increments of the builds. My tip is: use more slides to “parse” visual effects and coordinate them with the audio rather than single slides with long lists of complex build effects, requiring cumulative counts of their timed sequence appearance.

Short-Cuts

PowerPoint and Keynote sometimes “do things for you” so that you don’t have to specify every detail of your video’s timing, so work with a short presentation, say with three slides selected as a sample, and EXPORT TO MOVIE to see what worked and what didn’t. Do not do any work on timing unless you absolutely must. Once your sample is working the way you want, fix the rest of your presentation and then export the whole presentation. Go to your YouTube account, open up the STUDIO, and upload your video. You will almost immediately be assigned a link that you can circulate to those you want to see your show. You can add a description with keywords/tags so that any interested party can find your work, or keep the video private. My practice is to make a text file available on the internet and put the link to that file in the YouTube description.

for help with publishing your presentation on YouTube, click here