I need to add narration to slide shows in PowerPoint 2003. It is possible to do this by embedding the sound files in the presentation, but only if they are .wav files, which makes the presentation big. It is also possible to do this by embedding links to the files, as long as you keep all the files together so the presentation can find them. This allows .mp3 and other formats, so the total size can be much smaller.
I distribute presentations for use on other computers, so having to keep multiple files together is more trouble and more error prone. But the presentations are often several hours, so the size for a single file that embeds the wasteful .wav format can be dozens of GB. Thus both options look ugly.
I think there is some separate mechanism available for grouping files together, called “Pack and Play” or something like that. It sounded klunky but I haven’t tried it.
What have you found most practical to do? Any hints or rules of thumb or anything else useful to share?
“Pack and Go” is what the feature is called, and is PPT 2003’s solution to this issue. It can also include a Slide Show Viewer such that the destination machine doesn’t even have to have PPT installed on it.
I’ve never done narration as a separate audio file. I simply run the show and record the narration simultaneously through the Slide Show --> Record Narration feature.
A WAV file is just a container. You can actually encode using the MP3 codec in a WAV file. Now whether Powerpoint will play the resulting WAV file, I don’t know.
I was never happy with the quality of narration with embeds in PowerPoint. Not the technical end, which was fine, but the way I sounded as I recorded each slide’s narration separately.
I fixed this by doing the PowerPoint, going to an empty classroom, and doing a presentation to the empty room, recording my narration. With a little editing out the miscues (easy enough to do), I got a single track of narration. I then played this while running PowerPoint under “record presentation timings.” Finally, I took the timed version of PowerPoint and used Camtasia (there’s also free software that does this) to put in the video and audio tracks.
That’s way, way more complicated than is necessary. If you have Camtasia (or Captivate, or other similar program), you can simply use Camtasia to record as you play the slide show and narrate. I’ve done this many times, and with Camtasia you can also edit the audio track as needed.
It must. The link resolves to FileNotFound.html. Maybe this is symbolic of the fact that everything on a computer doesn’t just seem to take care of itself and make projects easy, but, should I be able to get to this? Thanks!
PPT 2003 uses its own internal codec, not one from the OS, even when you Insert | Sound From File. It’s doubtful the MP3 codec would play properly. This was remedied in later versions.
Camtasia is pretty great actually - if you’re having compression issues this would be what I would recommend provided you don’t want to get a later version of PPT.
I have to distribute to a corporate crowd with PPT 03. At some point within a year or so, I hear, we drop XP and move to 7. I don’t know what that does to PPT versioning. Generally I try really hard to find methods that won’t break, as opposed to high performance ones. I can use special software to create the presentations but need them to run on PPT itself.
It won’t do anything to PPT versioning - you can run PPT 2003 on Win7. But I imagine they’ll upgrade the Office version as well.
Camtasia and other special software will create a self-contained WMV / MOV / whatever, so unless your corporate crowd will need to edit these files, you wouldn’t have to worry about them all having PPT.
If they will need to edit them, then I’d say use Record Narration and play with the compression settings as best you can, (you can change the quality of the recording, the format and the attributes, and link the narrations), or use Pack and Go.