How to Sync PowerPoint Slides with Video

The enhanced version of President Obama’s State of the Union address is a bit different from the other Whitehouse video recordings in the sense that it incorporate presentation slides that go in complete sync with the speech video. You have the narrator’s video on one side of the pane while the other half displays the corresponding slide and these slides auto-advance as the video progresses.

So how do you create video based presentation slides in such a synchronized format?

If you are looking to create a Whitehouse-style presentation where the slides and the narrator’s video are made available as one video stream, you would need a professional video editing tool like Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut – there you have the option to places images and video clips side-by-side on the same canvas, something that’s not possible with free video editors like Windows Live Movie Maker.

To get started, save your PowerPoint presentation slides as sequenced images and import them all to the timeline of your video editor. Transform the image sizes such that they occupy half the canvas.

Now import your video recording in a separate layer and resize such that the clip fits the left space. You might also have to change the duration of individual images in the timeline such that they stay in sync with the video. Export the video and upload it to your favorite video website.

The other good option is Microsoft Producer especially when you wish to host both the video and the slides on your own server.

This requires you to save the slides as images first and then you may use the wizard to sync your video recording with the slide images. The final presentation cum video is available as an HTML web page and though there are a quite a few design templates to choose from, you would still want to have something better.

Finally, you have web based solutions like Zentation, VCasmo and Knoodle where you just have to upload your presentation slides (as PDF or PPT) and the recorded video and they’ll handle the rest. If your presentation assets are already available on YouTube or SlideShare, you may directly fetch them into Zentation as well.

You get an easy-to-use web interface to individual slides with the video points and once you publish the changes, anyone can view the video presentation using a browser. In the case of VCasmo, you may even embed your synced video on external sites while Zentation only offers a full-screen player for free accounts.

Some screencasting software, Camtasia Studio for example, offer PIP effects that may also help you accomplish similar results but that would be way more complex if you have more than a few slides in your presentation.