How to make a slidecast
plugin by rob
On Tuesday I made a presentation in London called Learning and Knowldge Maturing at an information day for the EU Seventh Framework for Research. The previous Thursday the organisers had asked me for a copy of the presentation. I use a lot of pictures in my presentations and files are big – too big for email. So I uploaded it to Slideshare as a quick way of getting it to them. Friday, I had a message from AmitRanjan who said: “any chance this could be converted into a slidecast…the audio will add context.”
I groaned at the thought of the work but of course Amin was right: if you use mainly pictures and few words (and no bullet points) the audio is very important.
I have made a number of slidecasts before and the workflow was tricky. Send the slides to iPhoto, import into iMovie, record soundtrack in GarageBand. Import Soundtrack into iMovie, sync sound with slides, export to preferred format, upload to blib.tv, Google or utube. Phew. Takes a day to do it.
This time I thought I’d give Slidecast a try. Slidecast is on-line software developed by Slideshare. The workflow is relatuvely easy. the slides were already on Slideshare. I recorded the audio on Garageband (if you are on a PC you can use audacity) as before. Uploaded it to my blog Slideshare does not host audio. Gave Slidecast the url and then used an online tool to sync up the audio and the slide transitions. The whole process took about 2 hours to produce a 25 minute slidecast. That is pretty OK for me. And slidecasts do get watched – we’ve had some 600 views already – with only about 20 of them coming from this web site.
