| title | description | published | date | tags | editor | dateCreated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Presentations |
Tips on presentations at an IETF session |
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2021-10-05 14:40:08 UTC |
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2021-10-04 09:47:20 UTC |
At IETF 91 a tutorial presented by Lee Howard provided tips on how to give a good presentation.
In terms of practicalities, producing a video of slides with a voiceover is a lot quicker and easier than producing a video that also shows the presenter, and gives something that seems quite polished and professional relatively easily. If you haven’t prepared prerecorded videos before, this is a good approach.
The Keynote application on macOS has built-in support for recording slides with a synchronised voiceover, and it can export as video suitable for use on the web (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/keynote/tan81813d552/mac). It works very well, and is easy to use.
Can Powerpoint can do something similar?
To produce a video that superimposes the presenter speaking on top of the slides, you need something like OBS Studio (https://obsproject.com), iMovie, or similar. These have a very steep learning curve. Getting the video to look good also requires an external webcam and careful lighting – it’s hard to produce anything professional looking with just a laptop camera.
Alternatively, you can record yourself presenting into an empty Zoom room, and export the recording. For people who can give a talk that they’re willing to post without editing, that works okay. But takes a lot of practise to do it well.
If the resulting video files are large, Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr) is a good transcoder that can make them a lot smaller, typically with no obvious loss of quality.
Creating captions is difficult. Tools like Zoom can auto-generated .vtt files that can be exported for use on the web, but they generally need significant amounts of manual editing to get something usable. YouTube will also generate captions. Captions are important for accessibility.
A good quality external microphone is essential. The Blue Yeti or the Elgato Wave:1 seem to be the top recommendations here.
There are also easier-to-use tools emerging that provide some of these capabilities (e.g. mmhmm.)