I put together a software help guide PDF for a company to use to help train new employees on some of their inhouse custom made apps. Now they are asking if I can do a sort of video lesson, whereby I would run a pre-made slide show (power point, keynote or similar) while appearing to stand in front of it and pointing out various things as the slides and transitions go by. Basically what the weather man does on the nightly news.
I tried searching but I’m not even sure what to call such software - is it screen recording? I see that Zoom has a virtual background capability, allowing me to use a video as the background. So if I exported my keynote presentation as a MOV file, this would probably work. But there doesn’t seem to be any way to manually step through the presentation slowly - the presentation plays ahead at full speed. I need to be able to stop the presentation periodically and talk at some length about certain things on screen.
What software do YouTubers use to make their videos and be able to appear to sit or stand off to the side while their content runs?
Here’s a crude mock-up of what I’m imagining: https://ibb.co/7r9hfvB That’s Keynote in the virtual background and me (not really) guiding watchers through the “lesson”.
Just a thought: worst case, you turn your presentation into a bunch of separate JPG files, then in Zoom manually change the background to the next slide each time you want to click forward a slide.
Not smooth, but if there’s no other option in should work.
Zoom will do this easily. You can either pre-load the background pictures as backgrounds and then select them one at a time OR you can use PPT and set the timing> export as a movie> import that into Zoom as a movie background. I recommend changign the background for each slide (it is just a mouse click if you set it up right) as the movie is hugely limited in quality by Zoom. We’re talking almost VGA quality if the movie is too long.
The idea is you stand in front of a greenscreen, which is literally a green backdrop that needs to be brightly lit so it’s vivid, then it gets removed via a process called chromakey, or just “key”. That is so common among YouTubers nowadays that I’m sure most off-the-shelf software does it with ease, and probably even your phone can too (not sure though).
You can buy greenscreens from Amazon. It doesn’t need to be big and complicated, small ones with stands are good enough. Hang one of these from a hook on the wall and you should be fine. But as I said, lighting it up brightly and avoiding shadows will improve things.
To the last three responses that mentioned green screen, thanks but I actually talked about that in my OP. Zoom has a virtual background feature (basically the same thing as “green screen”) that lets me stand in front of any image or movie I care to select.
The problem is I want to manually advance my way through a powerpoint or keynote slideshow as I talk about it, and there is no way to do this in Zoom aside from Quercus’s idea of taking individual still images of each slide and manually changing them each time I was to “transition” to the next slide.
So unless there is some way to set the actual .ppt or .key as the virtual background, I’ll probably end up doing that.
Though Zoom can do that crudely, it does it more effectively with a greenscreen. And I’m not convinced Zoom is the best software to do this in anyway, as this kind of interactivity is not its primary purpose.
When you say video presentation, are you talking about a live presentation, or a recording that will be played for the training sessions? If it’s the latter, it should be fairly easy to record the talk in front of a green screen and then put the slides behind you during editing.
The latter. It’s the “put the slides behind you during editing” part I’m not skilled at. Also, I really need to see the slides while I’m talking, since they will guide my dialogue.
After much searching, two programs have been suggested to me by YouTubers who do this sort of thing for a living: OBS and Kdenlive. Hopefully no steep learning curve involved.
That’s easy enough to do, just put your laptop/computer/large monitor next to or under the camera that’s recording you. The closer it is to the camera lens, the more it looks like you’re looking right at the camera, even though you’re actually looking at the image in your powerpoint. A small remote control in your hand can advance the slides as necessary so that you can always be viewing the slide that you’re talking about.
Pro TV station setup to give you a visual. You don’t need to go nearly that fancy since you should already have some idea of what you’re talking about & just need the slide to remind you to cover all of the bullet points. TV anchors may not have any clue of the story until they’re reading it.
