A piece of software for the Mac called Ishmael made this easy. It was expressly designed to either do voiceover of a slide show in realtime (but other tools can do that now, Profcast and others), but even more useful, merge slides with pre-recorded audio.

Now I use Final Cut Express.

Open Final Cut Express
Go to User Prefereces and select the “Editing” Tab
Set Duration for your average time per slide — and a bit more. I start with 2 minutes a slide.
Import your images and audio
drop audio in a track
drop your first image into track one
drop your second image into track two — stagger it after the image in track one
drop your next image into track one — again — stagger it after the last image
You have now created what used to be called a “checkerboard edit”
Now — drag your images around to sync up better — you can drag ends of images to make them shorter if you need to — that is why it is better to start with them a little longer than needed.

If you really have your act together you can use the chapter marks in FCP to make this even easier, and the bonus is those chapter marks will export out (ie to a DVD).

export to your fav format — but if you can, go with a really low frame rate (1 fps) and spend your bandwidth on higher temporal resolution. for quicktime, use plain old jpeg as your video codec, otherwise for podcasts you are more constrained.

If someone knows what happened to Megaptera and Ishmael — it is a shame their software vanished — for I have lost my installer, so my license is useless. Another reason for open source I guess.

–hal

Keynote, Export to PNG images

Open QuickTime Player Pro

File -> Import Image Sequence, choose 1 second

File -> New Audio Recording, record your voice

Copy/Paste Audio to a new Movie file

Select the slide show movie
Use left-or-right arrows to select a slide
Select the slide using Shift-right arrow
Copy

Switch to new movie file, Edit -> Add To Select & Scale

Control-B to un-select

Repeat these steps.

Hope this helps. Thanks for the tips.

-Frank Cohen
http://www.pushtotest.com

First, I think post-production is the wrong model.

You do not want to take a presentation you’ve already given live and then re-do it or re-record it and then, on top of that, synchronize audio and visual.

If you’re going to do that, you might as well go straight to non-linear video editing.

But at least capture the audio of your presentation live using, say, a handheld mp3 recorder. (There’s nothing worse than a canned recording of someone talking to his computer.)

Then drop the audio and slides into any video editing program–iMovie would do.

I assume if you want to learn Flash, you can drop everything into Flash and output to that format.

But that is not the way to go.

The way to go is to capture everything in realtime. It should not be about post-production–editing–it should be about recording/capturing.

Back in 2000, Realmedia made something called RealPresenter, which plugged into Powerpoint on the PC. It captured your presentation in realtime with video and/or audio. It captured the slide timings, etc.

Microsoft had a version, too.

Adobe’s Breeze is one such Powerpoint plug-in. Again, it’s for the PC (as far as I know). I believe there are others.

Similarly, there are screen capture softwares for the PC (camtasia’s progeny, which I believe breeze is) which might capture what’s on your screen and save it to Flash. These are for software demos–google screen capture software demo–so they often record narration and even allow it to be edited.

But the screen capture software was mostly for the PC, which is an admittedly larger market.

So these programs that were essentially free plug-in’s to the ubiquitous office suite that’s generally installed on everyone’s PC at a bargain price, now they’re high end $299 to $599 software.

Why?! Is this the rationality of the marketplace? How did freeware and shareware become VeryExpensiveware?

It *is* the case that the logic of the market would dictate that a smaller market has fewer people bringing products to it, hence the weakness in this area on the Mac. But that says nothing about why the live capture of presentations or what’s onscreen is not simply a ubiquitous built-in feature on many systems.

Now if you know someone at Openoffice, their office suite already outputs presentations to flash, but they have no narration/voiceover recording tool.

Why not ask them to put it on your wish list?

Or you might ask Dick Hardt how he captured his Identity 2.0 presentation.

Re-registered with new email and password – still cannot get login accepted

Waht can I do to get login accepte so I can post video

My solution was to use the capture utility Snapz Pro, http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/ … with it, I could page through the presentation with my right hand while holding the microphone with my left. No timing, no splitting, no muss, no fuss.

You can see the result at http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov … there are a couple rough spots, but in general I think it came off well. And I’ve got tons of positive feedback on it.

Thanks again for your inspiration.

Check it out at http://www.jonobacon.org/projects/raccoonshow/ 🙂

Jono

I’m late with this comment and I don’t know if you’ll se it, but I think you might be able to get what you want with SnapzPro. It is a screen capture program but will also capture video (often used in making tutorials where you show people which menu to use, etc). You can set up Snapz to record audio, so just run the presentation and talk into the mic. I’m not sure how big your file would be and you might want to run it through QT to convert it to a smaller format. SnapzX will record from a USB micro phone if you set it up in the sound preferences pane first.

Alternatively, if the audio situation in Snapz isn’t acceptable, the combination of SnapzPro, Audio Hijack, and iMovie should suffice. Audio Hijack Pro will record your audio while you do this and then it’s simply a matter of dropping the two output files into iMovie and mixing down.

Perhaps the biggest fault with this method would be file sizes. I ran a test with this and followed the recommendation for “animation” and ended up with a 700MB file. QT Pro exported it to mp4 for me and it was less than 2 MB. Snapz lets you choose your codec though, and you could get away with pretty low framerates, thus avoiding the QT conversion. Worst case, you can export to a favored setting (Movie to iPod??) in QuickTime Pro.

Tedious, to say the least, and you’d quickly end up with an unusably long command line.

As well, I’m looking for something that can be done “live” – i.e. an audio stream comes in, we add images to it and the result is a video stream. If mencoder could accept a file for the list of files, along with how long each should be used for, it’d probably be simple, but it doesn’t appear to be a possibility. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know! I’m probably just misreading the mencoder docs, but they’re not the simplest things to understand.

Here’s an example. it’s a “virtual oriention” to our school’s implementation of Blackboard.