A Step By Step Guide To Making Movies with Camtasia That Anyone Can Do Using PowerPoint For Movies With Text

Start with a blank PowerPoint slide using your favorite template. It will look something like this. Then by dragging the respective boxes flip flop the Title and Add Text boxes.

The result should look something like this. Then change the font size in the Title Box to 24 point. You might have to experiment. The goal is to accommodate 3 lines of text.

Now make several copies of your newly created slide. (Right click in the slide pane and choose duplicate slide. That will serve as a template for you.

The effect is to make the text at the bottom like subtitles or captions. The movie itself will shrink. If displayed in a blog it will be 400 x 300, so need large text to keep it readable.

The upper pain is regular PowerPoint and with that you can do what PowerPoint does. In this case there is a simple animation of a well known math result. (x + y) 2 =(x + y) =x 2 +2xy + y 2

For an image simply paste it into the upper box. It should size well so it fits nicely. Technically this is quite easy with the real work finding the appropriate images.

PowerPoint likes to resize the text in the caption when there are about to be three lines of text. Resize it back to 24 point, but don’t have more than three lines afterwards.

Camtasia has a plugin for recording PowerPoint in Slideshow Mode. It is very nice but it doesn’t show the timings, so rehearse the timings in PowerPoint itself.

If you are going to do this to background music, it is probably easiest to have a uniform time per slide. For this much text, 10 seconds is ample and easy to measure.

When you are finished recording and adding your sound track, you are ready for production. There is a preset for Blog that is easy to use and makes the right size.

Conceivably you could actually write this way, which might make sense if you feel your writing is a bit lyrical. In this particular case, since it is a demo, the image box was deleted and then the box with the captioning was expanded to take up the full screen. So technique-wise it is pretty easy to do. Do note that unless the actual PowerPoint file is included (as a link, for example) the text in the video won’t be searchable because during the capture it gets converted to an image. Also let your viewers know they can pause the video if the screen transition happens faster than they’d like.

Let’s close with a caution about Copyright. This particular image was found at The Huffington Post. Do they have a right to use it? Do you? Dats all folks.