PowerPoint to Vegas and Masking

Rob Bogue wrote on 1/19/2009, 3:42 AM
I'm trying to produce a set of training videos. They include me in front of a green screen (which works fine), on top of a set of PowerPoint slides, on front of a moving background (which also works fine.)

The problem I'm having is getting the PowerPoint slides to look good -- and to drop out like I want them to. First, the slides have the dreaded jaggies. I've tried exporting in a variety of formats and with different techniques and I can't find anything that looks really good. my baseline test was with .PNG. This produced files with a resolution of 960x720 (which didn't look that good depite the slide downsample.)

I switched over to saving the file to PDF and then exporting all of the pages out of the PDF as TIFF images. That left me with a slide with a native resolution of 2000x1500 -- so I got more downsampling and generally better results, however, It's still not quite what I'm looking for.

So my question is this, is there any easy way to build masks based on the chroma or luminance in a slide and add a slight blur? Or is there a better way to accomplish this without regenerating or enhancing each slide individually? I've managed to play with compositing and get things to drop out correctly -- but I've not yet managed to introduce the blur that I think will help take care of those jaggies. (By the way, if anyone's got a link for really good coverage of compositing ... I'm interested, the help system isn't all that useful. Particularly if you want to use one video track as an alpha to decide between two other tracks.)

Comments

farss wrote on 1/19/2009, 3:52 AM
I've been down this painful road. Th e best way I've found to go from PPT slides is to save as PDF and then open in PS, save a jpg or png. You shouldn't need just huge resolution either. If you have fine horizontal lines though you'll get line twitter on interlaced displays. Use the Gaussian Blur FX in Vegas to tame these. Add it in the vertical direction only around 0.001 to 0.003 should do the trick.

"Particularly if you want to use one video track as an alpha to decide between two other tracks.) "

I don't think you can do this easily at all. You have to create / render a B&W mask and use that to control one track and the inverted version to control the other. Very rare that you should need all this though, perhaps you're overcomplicating what you think you need to do to get your outcome. It's a common problem I have with compositing as well.


Bob.
Rob Bogue wrote on 1/19/2009, 4:22 AM
Well, at least I know I'm not alone on the difficulty... I've got a ton of slides so the idea of opening them up individually and resaving them as files isn't very appealing. Luckily PDF Pro will allow me to export all of them in one shot.

I'm targeting a computer based progressive display so I shouldn't have the flicker problem.

On the compositing, in my playing I managed to get the text to actually be the masked part so I was seeing the background (which was a slow motion clip) through the slide. This was a cool effect. If I could get that to work with a different clip and essentially have two clips -- one on the high part of the mask, and the other on the low, it would give me the ability to make the text "sparkle" by using a slow moving gradient underneath. That's not critical for me, just stumbled across it and thought if I could get it to work it would add something cool.
Coursedesign wrote on 1/19/2009, 6:04 AM
I'm surprised PowerPoint doesn't have video export built-in at this point.

Those who run Vegas on Macs can do their presentations in Keynote (which is also more useable than PP imho), and just export the presentation as high quality video.

I think there are however some (very expensive) 3rd party programs for exporting video from PP to help those who don't have time for the manual slide-by-slide methods.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/19/2009, 6:24 AM
Camtasia Studio has a Record PowerPoint option which will create a video as you display the slides. You could flip through the slides quickly and use the video with a velocity envelope in Vegas to control the speed later.

~jr
Rob Bogue wrote on 1/19/2009, 2:49 PM
Actually, using Camtasia makes it harder to get the right results. (I tried it.) Once you output it you're in a lossy format so the artifacts start interfering with the masking/keying process.

Does anyone know if events are applied first or if pan/crop is applied first? -- and if I can force events to be processed before the downsampling from pan/crop?
TorS wrote on 1/19/2009, 9:22 PM
There's a video signal flow chart in the manual - p. 43. To force a different flow you must move things to a higher or lower level, like track level, event level etc.
Tor
farss wrote on 1/19/2009, 10:10 PM
I've tried everyone of the methods that have been suggested over the years including I think all of the options you have to pay for. I've even written my own macros and VB code to do the export, nothing helps because the problem is how PPT rasterises the text as it converts it to jpg or bmp or any of the other options. Even capturing back off the screen is just as bad. It of course looks OK fed into a data projector, it plain sucks for use in video. Try a slide with one of those nasty fonts that renders at 1 pixel width in 8 point.

The latest PPT lets you save the whole thing as a PDF. The show stopper is of course when you open that in PS you have to select the page and the whole process is manual. I'm certain this part is automatable and one day I'll get it to work as PS now supports both scripting and automation.

Bob.
[r]Evolution wrote on 1/20/2009, 7:32 PM
http://www.planet9productions.net/DEMO-Video <-- check out the 3M Powerpoint Presentation.
http://media.bodyshoptv.com/BuyingGroup_Orientation <-- this 'poorly lit' presentation is also Powerpoint driven.

For both, I exported the PP to PS then exported the Slides to PNG.
On the latter, I made other GRFX that brought the specific points to the attention of the viewer.
Rob Bogue wrote on 1/23/2009, 12:39 PM
I did finally figure out a technique that works well, looks good, and doesn't require the use of the chroma keyer. I've posted the details at https://www.thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2009/01/23/exporting-microsoft-powerpoint-slides-into-sony-vegas.aspx