Search on powerpoint in this forum. The subject has come up several times. In the past I have used a video card with TV out. I record the powerpoint presentation to my camcorder and then capture it in Vegas.

Scan Converter

Marty, take a look at the free Microsoft Producer at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/technologies/producer.aspx.

-jerry

I had the same question a few weeks ago. In the end the microsoft producer option did not generate acceptible results for me. I ended up doing most of the graphics over to get the quality I would admit I worked on.

Last night I downloaded and tried camtasia studio 2.0 on the same presentation (the first few slides - it was late). Seems to generate great results and reasonable file sizes. It also can be used to save to a flash file for web site posting.

Give it a shot, quick demo download 30 day trial period. I am afraid I have found a use for $300 more of my wife's money.

Thanks for all the responses. I'm aware that this has been discussed before and camtasia came up as the best tool (with a price of course) and just thought if there's a better way to do it (free) directly from Vegas. Well.. maybe not. Thanks though.


Marty

Marty, you can always save the slides in PP as jpegs and put those in the timeline, add the audio and adjust timing.

Jay

for some reason that method did not produce good results for me. The main problem is, I was given a "cd of photos" from someone to include in a video, and of course it was a slide show in ppt. So, I don't know what res the pics were scanned in at all. When I saved them off as jpeg or png it came out looking very jagged on an ext. monitor. I would actually prefer to do it this way but may not be able to.

I created a little tool that allows you to save the slides from a powerpoint file as Jpegs or PNG's at whatever size you would like.

Download the Powerpoint Image Exporter - it's free.

Maybe It would make more sense to go the other way around... embed video into the presentation. I've done it a few times myself. I have to warn you that some installations of Powerpoint like MPG and some like WMV, so just make sure you do a simple test on the target computer.

dmcknight, that's a tough one to figure out, especially when you get handed mystery material. What I was given was the original PowerPoint generated file. Now that you mention it, I've gone back and checked. I did save them as .png files (lossless). The client was told that the video would look no better than the slides in PowerPoint presentation. On top of that, they wanted it compressed as a .wmv file.

Jay

I did some research on the subject a while back and came across a software called PPT2SWF. The program will convert a PPT file into SWF, animated transitions and all. I have downloaded the program but didn't have time to try it out yet. If Vegas 5 can read the SWF file generated by the software, it may be just what you need.

Norm

This might be the solution I'm looking for. Thanks for posting the link.

Making it the other way around (video embedded in PPT) is not an option for me because I need to produce a DVD movie out of this presentation.

Jay, I did think about that alternative (saving everything into JPG or PNG), but I was going to use that as the last resort because I just got greedy to capture all the animated transitions as well.

Thanks for all the tips. I've downloaded this ppt2swf and I'm going to try it asap. Thanks again guys!

Marty