Final Cut Pro Quick Tip #27
Oct. 20, 2003 - CEOs and Presidents of companies love to use PowerPoint presentations in every meeting they have. Now that the company is starting to release videos of said head honcho presentations, you are getting requests to take their slides and use them in the presentation. Deity help you if you are asked to do this. Fortunately, there is an easy way to do this in Final Cut Pro, and this very quick Quick Tip shows you how.
Method #1 [an error occurred while processing this directive]In PowerPoint go to File>Save As. When the Save As window appears use the drop down menu and select the .JPG format.
PowerPoint will then give you option of saving the currently selected slide or the entire presentation. Select the appropriate option for your task. Chances are you will have to do them all, so make it easy on yourself.
After a few moments the application will tell you the task is complete. You can now close PowerPoint and open Final Cut Pro.
What has happened is that each slide has been converted to a 720x540 72 dpi image. While this may look crude on your monitor, it will look okay when you import the slides into Final Cut Pro.
Import the images like you would any other still image and edit them in where appropriate.
Chances are you will have to resize the images slightly to get them to fit. The problem with this is if you resize the entire slide, you will also be resizing the text bits and could make them more difficult to read. In this case you may want to do
Method #2
Retyping all of the slides all by your lonesome doesn’t sound like a way to spend your weekend, and if you are a bad speller you could be asking for a lot of trouble. Instead, from the PowerPoint Save As window use the Rich Text format (.rtf) instead. This takes all of the slides and converts them into an outline.
You can then open the .rtf document and copy and paste the necessary information and create a new slide in Title 3D or Basic Text.
The problem here is, most mucky mucks want to use THEIR slides they way THEY had them created. They don’t need you monkeying things up and losing the company millions in investor dollars.
Which leads us to
The Happy Medium
Most of the higher ups I’ve dealt with usually have someone else creating their presentations for them and usually don’t see the slides until their helper is finished. If this is the case talk with the assistant and ask them to keep in mind the following:
Keep It Simple – convince the assistant not to put too much information on the slide.
The larger the font the better – nothing below 20 point if at all possible.
Title Safe – Show the assistant what title safe is. Show them that the President’s message will be lost if the most important information is hidden by the monitor’s bezel.
Be Diplomatic – if you have to make all of the changes yourself, be polite. Hold your tounge when the head honcho berates you for trying to make changes. Explain things carefully and slowly. Then, explain them carefully and slowly again and remind the person that you are trying to make the presentation the best it can be. Let them even think it is their ideas the changes need to be made. You’ll be better off.
This very quick Quick Tip is so simple, you may be hitting yourself over the head wondering why you didn’t think of this last Friday before you spent the entire weekend doing it all by hand. Next time (and there will be a next time), you’ll be able to enjoy your weekend and still make the CEO think you worked your rear off.
Looking for past Final Cut Pro Quick Tips? Click Here.
When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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