PPT Slide export, again.

farss wrote on 11/13/2008, 5:08 AM
This is driving me nuts. I've probably already lost one client over it. I've almost cracked it but it's a slow and tedious process to truly get good results.

For those who don't recall my bitching about this over the years here's my expectation. To get as good looking results exporting the slides out of PPT and dropping them into Vegas / PPro / AE as pointing a DV camera at the screen in front of a data projector. This should be dead simple. By exporting the slide I've eliminated the optics in the project, the optics in the camera and the DV compression. And yet it can't be done, why?

I've tried every program out there, including Beam's exporter. None give any difference in the outcome, they just automate the task. One problem is Beam's code no longer works right due to changes in Office 2007. Not a big problem, that I fudged enough to get running. Except for some reason that I've yet to fathom PPT will no longer export slides at high res to jpeg or png, I only get the upper left hand quandrant of the frame with the image in it, the rest of the png frame is transparent!

So the best method I've now found is to Save As PDF out of PPT, open the PDF in PS and save out of there as jpg. But there's a problemo. So far I can only get PPT to save either each slide or all slides into one PDF. Selecting each page out of the PDF one at a time is a huge time waster and I can't seem to batch the process in PS. So I'm looking at writing some code in PPT to automate saving each slide into it's own PDF.

Has anyone got a better solution before I go off and do this, more than happy to share it around here when / if I get it to fly. Just hate to waste time if someone has already cracked this. Just to reiterate, I can already export slides out of PPT, my problem is the results are hopelessly bad, exporting PDFs seems to be the only solution. I regularly do jobs with 100s of PPT slides so whatever the answer is it has to be automated or I'll go broke and even nuttier.

I do have one thought. I guess I could just playout the slide show onto my LCD monitor and shoot that with a camera. I really hope I don't have to resort to that though, how quaint would that be.

Bob.

Comments

MarkWWWW wrote on 11/13/2008, 6:05 AM
If you choose to save as a .emf and then choose to export all files you get each slide as a separate .emf file (enhanced windows metafile) at high res. You can then batch convert these to .png or .jpg or whatever using your graphics software.

Mark
rs170a wrote on 11/13/2008, 6:23 AM
Mark, thanks for the tip/reminder.
That's the file format I used a few years ago when I needed to get a company org chart (MS Word format) into Vegas.
As you said though, it will be very high res.
I just tried this again and one page of text came out to 5,000 x 5,000 pixels :-(

Mike
johnmeyer wrote on 11/13/2008, 9:27 AM
These are the usual solutions to using Powerpoint in Vegas:

Powerpoint to video
======================
PowerPoint 1

PowerPoint 2

PowerPoint 3

PowerPoint 4
farss wrote on 11/13/2008, 1:10 PM
And as usual none of them make the grade, except for one I hadn't tried before as for the task it's expensive. Powervideomaker does produce an uncompressed AVI file that doesn't look too bad, pretty much on par with dropping jpegs out of PPT into PPro.
Only problem is of course I've then got to slice and dice that AVI file to match the timing of the actual speech. For anyone who wants the show as a video with the transitions and audio as video I have to say Powervideomaker is VERY good. Not only will it render to 4:3 and 16:9 it will also do 720p and it works with PPT 2007 but it will also let you add a border so you can keep the slides inside a safe area. It gets 9/10 from me.
I'm going to also try the suggestion above of using a .emf out of PPT and into PS.

Bob.
Who8MyLunch wrote on 11/13/2008, 4:13 PM
One option might be to run your PowerPoint slide show like you normally and just capture the screen using Fraps. This will results in a huge video file, which you can edit in Vegas and re-render to something more manageable.

Just try Googleing for "fraps".
farss wrote on 11/13/2008, 5:41 PM
Huge video files don't scare me, plenty of TBs of disks here :)
What is my biggest real issue is as this production is six hours of video of a marketing and economics conference and for the first time in the 4 years I've shot this event many people want the DVD in a hurry. Given the current volatile state of economy that's understandable. So I just need to get on with it and put finding the best solution on the back burner for a few days or weeks.

How I'm handling this now is to just export the not so good jpegs out of PPT and batch them through PS to fill the frame. That's quite quick to do. At the same time I have PS open. If I find a slide with tiny text that need to look better I just switch to PS, open the PDF of that presentation and export that slide and replace the slide in Vegas. Thank goodness I'm using a fastish quad with 2GB of RAM.

Hopefully next year I'm going to shoot this event in HD and deliver it in HD, that'll solve a lot of problems. With a bit of luck I can fit the presenter and the slide show in the same frame.

Bob.
Who8MyLunch wrote on 11/13/2008, 6:39 PM
If it's simply a matter of getting the standard "Save As..." method to generate your folder of JPEGs or PNGs at a higher resolution, then have a look at this article at Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827745
farss wrote on 11/14/2008, 12:00 AM
I remember I did that when I used Office 2003, forgot about the registry hack. But then I read
"Note The registry key for PowerPoint 2007 will not work with Office 2007 Service Pack 1.".
Throwing caution to the wind I tried it anyway. It sure does something. PPT creates jpgs of the size I specify but with just part of the slide in the top left corner, the rest of the image is black, sigh.

Some more Googling reveals that it ain't me, M$ broke PPT 07 with SP1.

And then I find this comment "Note that text in images exported by PowerPoint 2002, 2003 and 2007 usually look shabby no matter what resolution you choose". So I ain't the only one who thinks there's a problem with the rendering of text quality in PPT. That was from a site that wanted to sell me another PPT slide exporting Add In. Good thing I tried before I bought because contrary to their claims their output's text isn't any better.

Bob.
VideJoe wrote on 11/14/2008, 5:09 AM
Don't know if this is any good, but I use Power Video Maker from Presenter Soft, which creates a movie from a Power Point presentation.
daryl wrote on 11/14/2008, 6:34 AM
I too have tried a lot of software, but I get the best results from the most simple. Hit "print screen", then paste into Photoshop. I just finished a job in which speakers were using PPTs. I had a head-and-shoulders shot of the speaker, did the print-screen, paste into photoshop, save as .psd, dropped it into Vegas and then picture-in-pictured the speaker into the project. This way I had a pristine PPT slide and the speaker addressing it at the same time. The customer LOVED it.