Improving PowerPoint Slide Graphics

Butch Moore wrote on 7/3/2018, 10:52 AM

The video in my project is 1080i. I've imported PowerPoint slides at 1280x960. All is good, except the quality of the text on the PowerPoint slides seems to greatly diminish (smaller lines, wiggly characters, fuzzy text, etc.). The deliverable will be Mp4 at 720p. Is there a workflow that will better preserve the text quality of the slides? Thanks!

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 7/3/2018, 1:37 PM

It soundsl like you are upscaling your Powerpoint slides. That's the big quality hit you won't overcome, other than mask out the existing text area and reinsert media text.

That said, you will get some improvement by selecting Interpolate, Best, in your Project Properties.

Butch Moore wrote on 7/3/2018, 2:00 PM

Sure was hoping for a magic bullet! Pretty much what I had deduced! Thanks!!!

mbarton wrote on 7/4/2018, 8:44 AM

I would try rendering the 1080i video to 720p first and then in a project with properties set to 720p add the Powerpoint slides and render to your final mp4 at 720p. This should avoid the upscaling of the Powerpoint slides to match the 1080i video, just to be delivered in 720p.

marc-s wrote on 7/4/2018, 12:25 PM

Try this:

1. Open the Powerpoint project and go to the "Design" tab.

2. Click on the "Slide Size" button then choose "Custom Slide Size"

3. Set the width to 20" and the height to 11.25".

Now when you export the slides as images they will be 1920x1080 pixels.

Butch Moore wrote on 7/4/2018, 12:37 PM

I'll give them a try. Off for the holiday today! Happy 4th of July everyone!

Butch Moore wrote on 7/10/2018, 11:09 AM

Researching the web, I found some rather intricate registry changes that were supposed to solve the problem. Frankly, I don't go there unless it's absolutely necessary! Marc-S, I used your easy suggestion and got great results by simply enlarging the slides in PowerPoint, exporting them to a new file and swapping a couple file names. You guys make me look good! Thanks!

rraud wrote on 7/10/2018, 12:01 PM

Most of the Power Point (or Keynote) presentations I've dealt with looked much better using a screen capture utility to grab the images, text and such. I like the free LightShot, which also has internal cropping utility a well as save, copy, ect,. I save the image at or about the project video size for insertion to the TL.