The perfect presentation recording
I have been doing regular presentations in my meetup groups for over ten years. I also do presentations for clients. It would be good to have a record of them. I have tried doing that a few times but I’ve never been satisfied with the results. A popular way of doing it is to overlay an image of the presenter onto the slides. Here is an example of that from the Loom website:
Here the presenter is overlayed on the user’s desktop, which I think is only appropriate if you are doing a technical demonstration. The same method is used with presentations, the presenter being overlaid on the slide in a bubble. I’m not a fan of this. Unless the slides have been designed with a space for the presenter, the image of the presenter will overlay text, images and charts on the slides. So what would be the best approach?
I will admit to being a bit obsessive about this type of thing. I’ve tried various methods before. This morning I think I’ve come up with a good approach (if it can be done efficiently…)
I prepare my slides in standard HDTV resolution: 1920x1080, which has an aspect ratio of 16:9. That’s a standard these days, and other common resolutions conform to it. So whatever my final video resolution is, it needs to conform to that aspect ratio. So here’s the breakthrough in my thinking — use the next common format up to incorporate both the slides and video of the presenter (in vertical format). The next resolution up is called QHD (Quad HD) or WQHD, and is 2560 by 1440. I’ve mocked that up in Photoshop:
That works right? We can show the full sides, and the presenter. We have space at the top and bottom which we could use for additional information. So what might the end result look like?
Yesterday I did a presentation on Artificial Intelligence and the law. I recorded a bit of the talk so I could experiment. What might that look like in the above format?
One thing to note is that I don’t tend to put much text, if any, on slides. I like to use full images. So this format works really well for that.
Ok, I am pleased with that, I think I may have finally solved this video layout issue. Now I need to see if I can efficiently create videos in this format. I guess that will be my next experiment.
Other notes
A few notes about the test recording of myself I did yesterday:
- If the video is going to have the presenter on the right, as shown above, the I need to make sure I am sitting on the correct side of the table so when I look at the slides, I am looking to my left.
- The Center Stage functionality of the iPhone doesn’t work well in this situation, and should be turned off.
- I need to make sure the camera is positioned so that my eye level is about at the top third of the recording.
- Annoyingly the iPhone when placed in vertical position but being used from Quicktime (or anything else I think) from OSX will still record in landscape mode. It would be better to record in portrait mode to remove a step of the process.
- Ideally I would record in portrait mode, because that is what I will use in the end video. Unfortunately it’s not easy to do that automatically when recording from the computer.