Giving Presentations with the KZO Virtual Studio

The KZO Virtual Studio, which Andrew mentioned in his previous post, is a powerful and unique web-based tool. But don’t take our word for it – give it a shot for yourself. It’s free to try with a KZO Express account. In this post, I’m going to walk through using the KZO Virtual Studio to produce a quick video presentation.

Like the last post on PowerPoint timing, we’re going to start with the assumption that you’ve have a presentation in mind, and some sweet slides for it. Unlike the last post, you don’t have a video presentation recorded. (That’s why you’re here!) You’re gonna record one right now, from the KZO Virtual Studio.

If you’re using KZO Express, you can fire up the KZO Virtual Studio right away by clicking Record from the admin panel.

If you’re using the Enterprise version of the KZO Platform, there’s one more step – you’ll need to select where your video’s going. (But that’s for another post.)

Setting up your Presentation

Welcome to the KZO Virtual Studio! Here’s what you’re going to want to do before you give your presentation:

That’s me!

Upload your materials
If you have a slide deck, click anywhere in the Additional Materials pane to upload your slide deck. (You can upload PowerPoint files, PDF files, or even an Adobe Flash SWF file.)

Create some Chapters
Chapters are searchable sub-segments of your video, specific to the KZO Video Player. You only need one chapter to produce a video - but make a few. Not only will they help your viewers stay organized and follow along, they’ll help you stay organized, too. Once you create them, you can switch between them in any order. Oh, and notice you can select a chapter even though you haven’t started your presentation. You’ll start on that one, so make sure you do select the right one first.

Do you want to do some screen capture?
If you just answered with an emphatic “YES”… well, I can’t hear you. But I’m glad you’re feeling enthusiastic. You can switch back and forth from recording your computer screen to recording your video using the tabs under the video. But do note – you’ll have to install the plugin first. Please bear that in mind. I don’t want you to get all ready for your presentation, and then have to install some plugin and restart the presenter. That’s no fun.

Let’s do this

You see that button already, though – yeah, the big one that says “Start Presentation”, the one you’ve been itching to click? You don’t need a manual for this. You were born ready. Click it already!

Oh, but there are a few caveats to keep in mind as you give your presentation. No, it’s not you, it’s us:

Additional Materials
You can advance your slides back and forth as much as you like while giving your presentation. That’s all handled for you on the back end. But if you’ve uploaded multiple slide decks (perfectly possible!) or even a Flash .swf (preposterous but permissible!) you need to switch between them using the “Push” button. That’ll ‘push’ the slide deck you select in the drop-down menu to the screen. Make sense?

Chapters
Like I mentioned earlier, you can move through them in any order you like. Click one to select it – you can do this at any time during your presentation. But once you’ve selected a chapter, you cannot go back to it again. i.e. – you can use each chapter only once.

Pausing your Presentation
Another one of those big buttons allows you to pause your presentation. The video will stop recording, but you’ll stay in the presenter. This is very useful for, say, switching between video and screen capture, or if you want to do a brief intermission (or if you have to go to the bathroom). The caveat with this: every time you pause, the Presenter will make a new separate video part in your playlist. So, you can pause as much as you like, but don’t get too crazy – you’ll end up with ten two-minute videos, instead of two ten-minute videos like you planned.

Give presentations using the KZO Business Video Suite, try KZO Video Suite for free.

Dave Chesebrough is a Technical Account Manager at KZO Innovations. You can trust him, he’s from the Internet. Contact him on LinkedIn.