PowerPoint Camtasias
I can't believe I haven't given away this procedure on the blog before. I think I've mentioned it in passing once or twice via comments, and explained it in the private Product University membership last month, but I'm sick of repeating myself, so...
Here is the formula to turn an audio product into a video product. It requires Camtasia ($299 with 30 day free trial) and Microsoft PowerPoint (OpenOffice is free, or you can get the downloadable home edition of Office 2007 for only $80 on Amazon).
Let's pretend you have an audio product that's 27 minutes long.
1. Open up a blank PowerPoint and start playing the audio in your MP3 player. (The default black and white theme will work fine for this.)
2. Fast forward to 1:00 (one minute) in the audio and start listening. Type in the main point of 1:00 to 1:59 as the headline of the slide, and type three quick bullet points of 1 to 6 words each. (Pretend you're back in school and taking quick notes).
3. When the audio passes 2:00, skip to slide 2 by hitting ctrl+enter. Type in your headline and three bullet points for 2:00 to 2:59 in this.
4. Repeat for the duration of the audio. The beauty of this is if you need to stop at say, 15 minutes, you can come back and you'll know exactly where you left off. By the end of this, your 27 minute audio now has 27 slides.
5. Insert a slide in front of all the other slides in the PowerPoint. Change its layout to title slide, and type in the name of the product and the author.
6. (Optional) Edit the master slide and insert your URL at the footer, that way your URL appears on all slides.
7. Select all slides. In PowerPoint 2003, go to Slide Show... Slide Transition. In PowerPoint 2007, there should be an Animation tab. UNCHECK the "advance slide on mouse click" box, and click the "automatically after" box, then type in 01:00 for one minute.
8. Resize your screen to 640x480 resolution, fire up Camtasia Recorder and set it to capture WITHOUT sound, full screen, at 1 frame per second.
9. Start the slide show and hit record (once you get good at this you can actually do it in one click with the "Add-Ins" menu but let's not get ahead of ourselves). Leave the computer, because if you click around on other windows, even if you have multiple monitors, it will mess up the slide show. Don't take too long of a walk because you'll want to be there to hit Stop as soon as the slide show goes black.
10. Stop the slide show, save the camrec, open up Camtasia Studio to edit your recording and import both the camrec video and the MP3 audio. Add a 2nd audio track and drag the MP3 in as the audio.
Congratulations, you've just turned your 27 minute audio into a 27 minute video, and it only took you 27 minutes to listen to the audio and about 2 minutes to get it into Camtasia Studio.
Now export it to an SWF 1 frame per second video if you want to show it on the web. If you want a downloadable version, I prefer to export to WMV. Camtasia 5 has a checkbox that will also export into an iPod version. Cool beans!
Guess what, you can also export the PowerPoint slides into PDFs as well. You've just given yourself an excuse to charge $10 or $20 more for your product.
Don't even have an audio product? Read your book aloud, word for word. Record it into Camtasia and export just the audio (I don't even bother with programs like Audacity).
This is how I make audio products. I'll record text word for word into audio, then PowerPoint it to make it a video.
Most of the time I'll do it backwards, and write PowerPoints where 1 slide = 1 page, then record the PowerPoint with Camtasia running, capturing audio as I read each page aloud, and change the slide when I turn the page.
Then export the PowerPoints into PDF, camrecs into WMV, MP3 and iPod... $17 e-book becomes a $47 video product.
For the products Jason and I are creating for the Daily Seminar, most of the time we don't even bother with the text... who has time to write when you are recording a 20 to 60 minute seminar every day? Just record Camtasia PowerPoints and export video plus audio plus slides. If people really want text, we'll transcribe them, but those costs really add up.
What are your thoughts? Do you use something similar to my PowerPoint Camtasia method? Do you have an even BETTER system than me? Please tell me to know, I'm dying to hear about it!
Filed in: Product Creation
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Robert,
This is something I have been doing for a long time. As a matter of fact I do these types of videos for clients. It is very effective for submitting to the video directories. You can even take PLR and turn it into videos with powerpoint!
Gregg
This is the method I use to repurpose content, and teach my clients to do this. (I do it every week with my Marketing With Audio And Video TalkShoe show.) However, they do it for much less money using my Commercial Creation Center (http://www.CommercialCreationCenter.com) – it’s meant for newbies who are intimidated by Camtasia. Plus it lets them create slides inside of it, record narrations, edit photos, take still screen captures, record web cam, record screen recordings, and automatically add intro and outro music for them. It has a Slide Show Video Maker, Audio Mixer, Video Mixer and Video Converter. It’s an all in one tool – BUT for audio/video novices.
I also teach them to break up their audio into multiple videos, so they get a bunch of shorter video clips that they can post throughout the week to increase their search engine rankings. I tell them to break out their audios according to the slides they can create to go with it.
Then they sandwich these excerpts with a freshly recorded intro and outro to talk about which excerpt this is.
I’ve got some upgrades I’m planning on adding in January which would allow them to simply pick the starting and stopping time code for each audio clip for each accompanying slide. Right now, they just create individual audios for each slide with our Audio Mixer.
Hope this helps. You can check out what I’m talking about at http://www.YouTube.com/pennyhaynes.
BTW, found this article through Twitter – @nichprof.
Dear Robert,
Thank you SO much for sharing this technique – I can’t wait to try it out. Not being an avid ppt user, I didn’t want to take time to teach myself how to do this.
I have so much else on my plate that I let learning new skills slide in favor of fixing broken links, etc… it’s tuff being your own ‘everything’ but that’s how it is when you aren’t in the league yet with the big-money guys like you. (Don’t get me wrong, I admire and respect you and think the world of you. I want to be successful and powerful like you one day!)
Anyway, your tutorial is much appreciated, and I’ll let you know how it works out in actuality when I spend some time setting it all up and testing it.
You rock!!
Joyous holidays,
Donna
A ‘Plankie Fan’ forever
I can vouch for the use of Open Office’s PowerPoint equivalent, Impress. I’ve used Impress several times in recent months to touch up presentations originated in PowerPoint and its pretty darn smooth.
This is going to work really well in conjunction with Jason’s 4-Minute Squeeze Pages!
Thanks for sharing!
Mitch
Terrific post, and a great system for making products. there are so many uses for this kind of thing its ridiculous.
I don’t think enough IMers realize the simplicity of making video products. I try to make one every day on just stuff I do on the internet that I think someone would want to know at some point. Also to train outsourcers how to do stuff as well, camtasia can’t be beat.
Hi Robert.
Good tutorial.
As i’m in product creation frenzy now for my website wich is about business plan in France, i’ve recently realize that ebooks were so long to create and too cheap at sale and that even simple ppt with javascript slide show with voice record on audacity and camstudio screen record software that could be an easier way to crank it up.
But i didn’t go through the process yet and this post is really providing me the hold-your-hand-bleprint.
By the way, have anyone use camstudio and camtasia. Camstudio seems to be too UC consumer to me. But the high price tag for camtasia prevent me to use this yes. If someone have test both, opinion appreciated.
Thanks very much and let me know if ur around paris for a nice hang out !
Armel Laminsi
http://www.franprofits.com
Hi Robert,
I’ve been using this to create products and blog posts for a few years as well.
I even put out a product a while back that teaches folks how to do this with all FREE apps plus gives them the players to post their videos to their site. FlashVideoRevealed.com (feel free to edit the address out if you so desire)
Also, just to make sure we do not neglect the Mac users of the world…
They can accomplish the same (with even cooler effects) with Keynote and ScreenFlow. Both available in the Apple store and less expensive than Camtasia and PowerPoint.
Good post Robert!
Regards,
Sam Knoll
As-SamKnoll.com
That post is just what I need Robert. It’s one of those things that I needed to learn about and now you have given it to me on a plate. Thanks.
The beauty of this method is that it is systematic. It takes all conscious thought out of it, and you can do just bang them out at will. In fact, after a while it becomes more fun than work — How many killer products can I create today?
That’s why our daily seminar membership is going to rock!
-Jason
Hey! Stop giving away all the secrets!
(just kidding)
It’s nice to see someone sharing good information for a change. Keep it up.
I’ve used it. It’s a great way to turn ideas into video products. Simple and time-efficient. Thanks for putting it into words, Robert.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned yet, but for those of you who don’t have PowerPoint you can use Impress, which is VERY similar and comes free with OpenOffice. (openoffice.org) Just an FYI. That’s what I did with the video on easydimesales.com.
Oh, another easy to create an infoproduct way would be to get plr content (they are everywhere now on every subject imagineable) and pay a competent writer to rewrite the content. Not very expensive and can work in any niche.
I have done it a different way, but I think your way may be better. Here is what I have been doing.
I make the slides in PPoint and “save as” jpg. It asks if I want to save just the current slide, or all the slides.
I import this as a source into Camtasia. The advantage here is that I get pretty slides with nice backgrounds. Also, I can change the amount of time each slide shows by merely adjusting them.
I add music intro and outro, too.
By the way, write a post telling us how the heck you get so many people to comment on your articles.
Click on the Top Posts tab and find the ten comment rule, that’s a big part of it.
Ten comment rule plus list building, Twitter marketing, Action Comments plugin, Subscribe to Comments plugin, and consistent posts… not much else to it.
I’ve been using camtasia and powerpoint for a while now and my clients absolutely love it. It’s a very powerful way to communicate concepts to people.
Done well, powerpoint can add an awful lot to a product and can really increase its value / differentiate you from the crowd.
Great post Robert!
Cheers
Jason
Don’t forget about using them for marketing. You can even use PLR for that! As a matter of fact I am creating a program that will import any kind of PLR into powerpoint and automatically format the font sizes to fit right on the screen. How valuable do you think that will be?
Gregg
Gregg, I would buy a program like that in a heartbeat. That means I wouldn’t have to create bullet points, I could just import articles and dictate them out.
I plan to have it ready in another week or so, plan to launch by the first of the year at the latest. Watch out for it in the Warrior Forum, I will pre-release it there first at a discount!
I am also going to add it to my Video Services that I do for clients as a lot of my clients have me do the videos just because English isn’t their first language or aren’t comfortable speaking.
I’ll keep you in the loop PHP Genius!
Gregg
I have not used this, but I know it is free and very much like Camtasia. It is called CamStudio.
Also, there is a free version of Camtasia called “Camtasia IM Edition Free”
You might google those.
Robert,
Great stuff as usual! If you take the time to think of all the ways PLR can be re-purposed, the options are almost endless!
Rock on.
Mark
Thanks Robert for sharing a such detailed trick for free.
BTW what is the Action Comments plugin and where can i get it ?
ciao
alexander
[QUOTE]
“PHP Author and Programmer Gives Away Insane Internet Marketing Advice Worth Stealing!”
[/QUOTE]
Robert,
You Lost Money!!
I would have paid $7-$27 for this tip.
🙂
I’m Eagerly awaiting Monday Morning so i Can Sign Up.
How do I make sure i don’t miss the Boat? :S
quick question…what microphone do you use?
looking for an USB microphone and not sure which one to get.
Awesome stuff, Robert. Please keep it coming!
Ceasar,
I use the Logitech Clearchat USB headset. It’s good quality, got a mute button built-in, and comfortable.
Mark