[MacDV] Re: Formatting problem: video in PowerPoint

[Mike Rehbein]

One example is 3M here in MN.
They have a staff of PPT experts who produce PPTs or actually PPS  
(the end product is a Show of course) of incredible quality. These  
were not segmented and assembled by the presenter the night before in  
a hotel room :)

I'd say half of my time in IT is spent learning and applying work- 
arounds that have nothing to do with computing as such. It's about  
learning to do without an advertised feature or how to make a broken  
feature work using 3rd party software or worse, having to write  
something in-house.

Most of the venders presenting to our IT staff don't bother trying to  
assemble a flawless PPT the night before in their hotel room. They  
simply break out of the show and then around to the next group of  
slides they want to show. Sometimes that's where the questions from  
us lead them. But, I understand in your case, your sales staff know  
the audience and have a track they know they wish to follow in a  
presentation. And a flawless presentation is the need :)

How many clips are you dealing with?
Can a clip be played on it's own or is it something the presenter  
talks through and needs to click when to advance to the next frame?

Mike

On Feb 19, 2007, at 2:48 PM, Ehrhart, Robert wrote:

> Good info, and a validation of what I'm facing. Like you, Mike, our IT
> department has a short list of supported apps, and we're talking about
> probably a hundred or so laptops. But as far as using Keynote,  
> iMovies,
> etc., I have to keep in mind that I'm the ONLY PERSSON in my  
> company of
> 6,000 that uses a Mac! These will be tools for the sales force;  
> they'll want
> to use the videos interchangeably depending on their target market;  
> my job
> is just to give them each a cd of clips they can use. What do other
> companies with these limitations do?
>
>
> On 2/19/07 3:39 PM, "Mike Rehbein" <rotorwash at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> I work at an IT shop.
>>
>> Our enterprise is all windoes (sigh.....!)
>>
>> The policy set does not allow users to install QT or anything else so
>> that each workstation and server remains standard.
>>
>> In the past, QT was installed but like any windoes environment,
>> installing an item on 3,000 boxes means 300 or more boxes will
>> require a visit from staff to "fix" the install. Add to that, once it
>> is working on all the boxes (and it never does on all.....) then
>> comes the maintenance trips to the boxes (hey, it used to work,
>> really). So as you can see, it is important to keep the number of
>> supported apps to a minimum. QT is not considered vital to the
>> enterprise for work so, it is no longer on the list of installed or
>> supported apps.
>>
>> That's why QT is not an option for us or many windoes shops....
>>
>> This is my beef with MS. My expectation would be that MS Office would
>> be cross-platform. And while much of it is, much is not. PowerPoint
>> is probably the biggest pain in not being cross-platform. Instead, MS
>> or the MBU (mac business unit) decided to use what each platform
>> deals with best when adding movies to PPT. So, PPT on the Mac uses QT
>> best and on the MS side of the fence, other formats are used. This is
>> just one difference. If you are making a PPT show on a Mac, it is
>> best to remain super simple if you wish to use the same PPT on a PC
>> for a presentation.
>>
>> Or, better yet. If you will use a Mac for the presentation, why use
>> PPT at all? Move on to (yep, it is painful to learn a different app
>> but.....) move on to Keynote. It will actually work. PPT needs to be
>> updated severely and I hope that someday, MS takes the time to do so.
>> It is appallingly messy to work with if you try to use many of the
>> spiffy features.
>>
>> After my more recent attempt to develop a fancy training PPT on my
>> Mac, trying to be careful and test each feature I used would work on
>> a PC, well, I gave up. I spent more time on the PPT functions than on
>> the training material itself.
>>
>> It was like having to do more maintenance on a car that I was driving
>> on a trip than the time it was taking to drive the trip itself....
>>
>> I still needed a product that would work on PC's so my work around
>> was and is to develop the training material in iMovie and create a
>> DVD. The PC seems to function with this reliably. I've had other
>> fancy PPT's simply break time and again in the past and I'm tired of
>> having to fix them or not fix them and remove the errant feature.
>>
>> PPT is great when all you need is to knock out a quick presentation
>> that consists of photos, graphics, text and little more. Very little
>> more :)
>>
>> YMMV,
>> Mike
>
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