Synchronizing PowerPoints with KZO

KZO’s pushing out an all-new presentation slide timings editor, and to coincide with that, I’ll be pushing out a few new blog posts on using KZO to sync your PowerPoint slides to video. So without further ado…

What’s all this synchronization stuff about?

Your conference was a great success, everyone loved the keynote speech, and your team had the foresight to record it on video. Now, your attendees can go back and watch it on-demand, and you can send out a link to anyone who missed the conference. The content is preserved and made easily accessible, and your viewers seem happy. Pleased with your progress, you go to watch the on-demand video yourself, when you realize – the keynote speaker is making constant references to his PowerPoint slides – and you only have video of him at the podium. You can put up a download link to his PowerPoint materials, and encourage your viewers to follow along. But it’s still not the same. Wouldn’t it be great if you could put his slides up right next to the video, and have them flip along with him as he gives his presentation, just like if it was live?

First things first

The KZO Video Player has an Additional Materials pod located right next to the video. The idea is that you can put pretty much anything you’d use as accompanying materials there – it supports PowerPoint slides, PDF documents, OpenOffice slides, and even Flash SWF files. As your video plays, the slides will advance automatically. This post is about setting up your videos to use it.

We’ll start with the assumption that:
A) You’re already familiar with the basics of the KZO Platform, and
B) You already have a video uploaded, and you’ve got some sweet slides for it.

First, you’ll want to navigate to the Edit Video screen for the individual video you want to time. That’s Admin > Communities > Manage Community > Manage Playlist > Edit Video.

Or, if you’re using KZO Express, you’ll access it from Actions > Mange Playlist > Edit Video from the Admin Panel.

At this point, if you haven’t already uploaded your slides, it’s really easy – if you click on the Reupload Files link in the sidebar, you’ll see an option for attaching an additional materials file.

Then, to get to the slide timings editor, click the Edit Slide Timings link in the sidebar.

From this page you can see an overview of all your slides and their timings. The ones on the top will display for their indicated time intervals. The ones on the bottom are inactive and will not be displayed. If there’s an interval in the video where no slide is specified, the window will just revert back to your Platform’s logo.

It’s completely possible to time your slides by manually entering start and end times from this page. However, our newer slide timing editor makes the process a little more streamlined. You can access the new slide editor by clicking the Manage Slides With Video button (it’s in the upper right).

The KZO Slide Timings Editor

Did you read my other post on MAGpie? Our new slide editor works on the same principle. As you watch your video, you have the option of setting the start or end times of the slide to the current time in the video. Then, when you click “Save & Continue”, the current slide will be saved and you’ll move on to the next one.

The updated slide timings editor.

Along the bottom of the editor, you’ll see all of the other slides in your presentation, and their timings. You can select any slide from this list, so it’s easy to switch between slides that aren’t in order.

Each slide has a start time and an end time. Two slides will switch seamlessly if the end time of the first slide lines up with the start time of the second. Like I mentioned, if there’s a gap, the Additional Materials pane will just display the default Platform logo. At any time, you can click Preview in KZO Player to see how your timings will look when they’re finished.

Note: make sure you click Save before you switch to another slide, to make sure the timings are saved properly.

This post is the first in a series about using slides in video. Stay tuned for more!

(Andrew told me I needed to make this post funnier. I challenge Andrew to make any post about PowerPoint slides entertaining.)

Dave Chesebrough is a Technical Account Manager at KZO Innovations. Aside from PowerPoint slides, he’s passionate about hobbyist game programming, personal development, and bumping rap music in his Cherokee. Contact him on LinkedIn.