Tag: product university

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!