I have to record a presentation that will include PowerPoint slides. What's the easiest way to stitch the slides into the video track at the appropriate time?
I was thinking to convert each slide into a jpg or pdf, but if there's a more elegant way I'd like to know.
Powerpoint has a feature to dump out the entire slide show as a series of JPEG images in one shot. Make sure you use a high enough resolution to match your video format, as Powerpoint may default to small images like 320x240.
In Vegas you can browse to the directory containing the images, click the last one, then Shift-click the first, and drag to your timeline. This imports all of them in order in one shot. They'll all be 5 seconds long, or whatever default still image duration you have set in Options / Editing. You can then adjust the timing of each individual slide on the timeline if necessary.
What you'll lose is any animations or timing you have set up in your presentation. You'll just get still images of the final appearance of each slide and all the same duration. If you do have animation and critical timings then you may indeed wish to do a screen capture into a video file instead.
In PowerPoint, choose Save As and select the image format you want (I usually use png). PowerPoint will ask if you want to save the current slide or all of them. If you save all of them, PowerPoint will create a folder based on the file name you specify and create an image for each slide. I do this almost every day -- works like a charm.
You may find WMV isn't a very good editing format. It's really designed for playback in media players. There will also be some quality loss (as there will be with JPEG).
If you can output your PowerPoint slides as PNG that would be best.