If you want to really emerse your audience, hit them with powerpoint video! Motion pictures involve your audience in a way that static photos cannot. Video can make your case interesting, easier to understand, and full-motion cinema gives monocular clues that impart stereoscopic depth.
That being said, video capture, editing, and playback can be difficult.
Capturing Video
Though most of us have a video system hooked up to our surgical microscope, few have video capabilities in clinic, limiting your videos to surgical ones. If you have your own digital camera, you may want to experiment with your camera’s video setting. Most of the videos taken at RootAtlas.com were taken with an inexpensive digital camera set to movie mode.
Editing Video
You will also need to edit your video, as nobody wants to sit through your entire two-hour extracap surgery. If you don’t know how to edit movie files, you may want to invest some time to learn this skill. Non-linear video editing is easier than ever on personal computers and this is a useful hobby to apply to your home movie collection as well.
Video playback can also be a hassle.
Powerpoint handles video files in a funny way … unlike photographs, Powerpoint doesn’t actually “embed” your video into the ppt file. Instead, the program “links” to it. This makes transferring your presentation to another computer tricky as you need to copy the powerpoint file and the video files and maintain the relative file structure between them. Also, some computers are incapable of playing certain video formats without first installing special video codecs.
Despite these difficulties, video can be rewarding and looks great when you get it to work. Check out our site in further detail on video tips related to ophthalmology.
Sources for Eye Videos:
RootAtlas slitlamp videos
Collection of downloadable videos, primarily slit-lamp movies, ready to insert in powerpoint
Novel Shirley Wray collection
A great site for eye motility disorders. The site is organized a little funny, but you can get to the videos and download them in a number of formats. These videos show real people with EOM problems, so use the videos responsibly and for medical education purpose only.
Youtube
Wide variety of movies, most of poor quality. It will take you some work to get them into a format compatible with powerpoint.
Good Video Editors:
Moviemaker (free with windows)
Moviemaker is a simple video editor that comes with windows. It is capable, but can only really edit a few formats: the DV video off a camcorder and video files in the windows media video format. Check out our moviemaker help section on using this program.
Womble MPEG Video Wizard ($100)
Program designed for editing MPEG1 and MPEG2 video. Fastest and easiest if you use a hard-drive based camcorder or take video on a Sony camera (not camcorder) like we do. We use this every day. It can only handle mpeg video, so it has limited utility … but if it works for your video system, it’s awesome and very fast. They’ve a free month-long demo download to try it out.
Adobe Premiere Elements ($100)
A simplified version of Adobe premiere. This program can handle most video formats and export into any other format. It even produces DVDs with menus. Somewhat mind-boggling at first, it does come with a good instruction book and is worth learning. A little taxing on system resources so it won’t work well on an old computer.
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powerpoint presentation tips
Comments and Feedback
2 Comments
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I find your tips very instructive. Do you have any experience with camtasia studio ($300)see http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp ? I think it is a very good program for educational purposes.
best regards,
Jan de Waard
Comment by Jan de Waard — October 10, 2007 @ 5:07 pm
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Thanks for writing. I’ve used Camtasia before, and find it a great program for screen capture video. I’ve used it in the past for recording my powerpoint and moviemaker training courses at mightycoach.com.
The editing software that comes with the camtasia suite has improved and the ability to export to flash makes the program great for distributing videos on the internet.
I’ve not used it for the videos here at Rootatlas, or the lectures at ophthobook.com because the techsmith capture video codec is not good at capturing the full-motion videos I use in my powerpoints. To capture powerpoint with full motion 30 frames-per-second, I find it easier to send my laptop’s video output to a digital camcorder. Then, I import the camcorder video back into my computer for editing and reencoding for the internet.
Thanks for writing, and sorry it has taken me so long to respond!
Comment by admin — November 2, 2007 @ 12:54 pm
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