SlideMagic Blog

Adobe launched a new iPad app, Adobe Voice, that enables you to create narrated story videos. There are many apps that help you build animated videos, but this is one of the best I have seen.

• It is incredibly simple to use (unlike most of Adobe software), with a beautiful user interface that breaks the conventional approach to video editing
• It comes with dozens of pre-set story lines: tell what happened, follow a hero’s journey, share a growth moment, promote an idea, etc. Once a story line has been selected, the app prompts the user on each slide with a question to answer (why did the hero set out on his journey?).
• After recording the audio, you can add images, icons, or text
• The app comes with a large library of background templates and sounds.

There is an 80/20 rule here, in 20% of the time, you get your video 80% right. Still if you want to get to 100% perfection (something that you are confident to share professionally), you need to get put in the other 80% of the effort. Prepare your visuals and images, and prepare your script.

It is cute that this app was developed for iPad, but for professional use Adobe should create a browser version as well for desktop. It can have the exact UI (except for resizing of images etc.). It is a bit tricky to extract your creation out of your iPad at the moment, and usually people do not have their image databanks stored on iPad.

Short videos can fit really well into a presentation. The audio track can be a problem.

1. Bombastic loud music can feel out of tone, especially if the sound was not set up correctly (too loud, too soft)
2. A spoken voice over might feel out of tone with your overall presentation
3. It is hard to edit/change video audio, maybe your message has changed over the past month, the voice over of your video has not

A good option can be to run a silent video, where you the presenter, gives live commentary in a voice the audience already has gotten used to, perfectly blended into your overall story.

I get this question often from startups who are in the process of fund raising. If you are on a tight budget, you might be able to hold off the big expense of producing a video.

1. There are videos and videos. Many of the animated videos you see today on the web (“So, you want to [FILL IN UNMET NEED]”) are presentations in disguise: an animated sequence of static slides. For some products, showing moving footage of the product is really useful. Examples are gadgets and other hardware that you often see on sites such as Kickstarter. If your product does not depend on a live demonstration, a sequence of presentation slides can be as effective.
2. Unlike consumers, investors are usually perfectly happy to click through a sequence of slides instead of playing a video
3. Videos are permanent and very hard to edit. Startup stories always evolve and change.

So, the best approach might be to start with an animated series of static slides. You perfect the flow over time and if you really feel you nailed the story flow (and you have the budget), you can make the expensive of creating a pitch video.

I am in the process of beefing up my software skills (Logic Pro X, nothing to do with presentations), and am spending a lot of time watching screen shot movies. I am just wondering why in these training sessions, the face of the presenter is not shown? OK, the screen real estate needs to be as big as possible, and a constant “talking head” on your screen distracts, but maybe a small introduction, at the beginning of a lesson?

This could be an idea for presentations that are used in cold email approaches: put a very short, very short, intro video of yourself on page 1 (to keep file size emailable and not take away the attention from the slides that follow).

It might seem cool to have an interactive slide full of clickable links in your presentation. In yes, in a 1-on-1 meeting you could permit yourself the luxury of clicking back and forth through slides as you tell your story.

For a big audience, a linear story is much better. And when you need to click on a link in a slide, it is likely to be the exact same link/box/object every time. Why struggle with mouse pointers and try to hit that exact box when you can just click through the next slide that starts playing your video? The audience will not notice the difference.

This question often comes up when we start discussing the first sketches of a presentation.

Videos are great, it is a studio quality recording of a presentation, you can do it over and over again until you get it perfectly right. In addition, you have more visual tools at your disposal to support your message.

Having said that, if there is no story, a flashy video is not going to change that. That is why I advise my clients to start with a regular presentation, slowly add more video-like slides to it (faster sequencing of images / shapes) and only then make the leap to video (and that can go in 2 stages, one a narrated recording of your video-like presentation slides, and two a professional animation).

Increasingly, YouTube is proven to be an excellent source of images. More and more videos are uploaded in 1080p HD (you can change the resolution in the settings menu at the bottom right of the video) which creates very good stills when you pause the video and make a screen shot.

To get the best results, try to size the YouTube window in such a way that it is around 1080 pixels wide.

If you want more control over what images to take, you can download the YouTube video to your machine (instructions here) and load the video into a video editing program such iMovie. Here you can move the playhead frame by frame to get the perfect shot.

Because of video encoding, you will see that images get blurrier when there is a lot of movement in the scene. If you want to show action, go ahead and grab the screen shot. If you want a crisper picture wait a few 1/24th of seconds until everything is calmed down again.

An obvious point: make sure that you have the rights to use the content.

If you are a startup, you should consider getting yourself on the beta list of Videolean, a tool that promises to help you create promotion animation videos for $100 or less.

It is amazing to see what you can pack in just 60 seconds of video. Take Videolean’s on video for example: they pitch the problem, the solution, and present how the tool works.

A tool like this can replace a large number of slides in an investor presentation.

(P.S. all these videos seem to be using the voice over of the same guy, who probably costs more than $100, I wonder who he is).

Videos in your presentation can be powerful, but embedding them using a YouTube link that needs a working Internet connection is a risky strategy in a live presentation, technology always fails when you need it most.

The website keepvid allows you to download YouTube videos to your computer and embed the video file in your presentation. The program comes with a few health warnings though:

1. Watch out for copyright. Keepvid is legal as long as you use it legally for material for which you have permission to use it
2. Keepvid is covered with ads and buttons that say “Download”, these usually link to a sponsor site and do not download your actual video. Watch carefully on what link you click.
3. Technical issues. It takes some time before the Java applet downloads, be patient. There is something funny going on with Java and Google Chrome, so when I use Keepvid I switch to Safari which works fine.

When you have invested in a great animated promotion video to put on your website, why not use it in your presentation? A good video can tell a relatively complex story in under 2 minutes. Most of these videos contain high quality art work that is great for use in a presentation.

Embed the video in your presentation (I prefer putting in the actual file rather than linking to an YouTube video) and create visual connections later on in the deck using screen shots of the video (either page-filling or small thumbnails).

Do not feel embarrassed that that video just cut your bullet point product explanation from 15 minutes to just 2, your audience will appreciate it.