Feb 22, 2009

PowerPoint to DVD Converter—Camtasia and Wondershare PPT2DVD

PowerPoint is among the most prevalent forms of persuasive technology used by business people, educators, students and trainers. Suppose you need to burn PowerPoint to DVD, I know it is not very popular, the most common reasons for converting PowerPoint to DVD are usability, portability and storage. Since DVD has become the preferred video format for most consumer applications and computer peripherals, creating a PowerPoint DVD makes good sense for storing and sharing. The DVD can be played on PCs which support DVD and TV with a DVD player connected.

Nowadays there are two types of tools meet the standard for converting PowerPoint to DVD. One is the screen recording tool and the other is the PowerPoint converter. The typical examples for these two types are TechSmith Camtasia and Wondershare PPT2DVD, after the testing, you may find the difference between these two tools.


TechSmith Camtasia (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp)


TechSmith Camtasia allows customers to create professional and engaging presentations, demonstrations and marketing videos in HD-quality video to reach audiences online, on portable media devices, or on popular online video sharing sites. Furthermore, Camtasia provides a PowerPoint add-in which can quickly and easily record PowerPoint presentations and produce DVD right from within PowerPoint.


Pros of using Camtasia to convert PowerPoint to DVD:


1. Staring slide show in PowerPoint, you may advance the presentation as you wish. The output will look the same as rehearse.

2. You may add narrations into your slide show while playing in PowerPoint.

3. You may edit the recorded video with Camtasia. Many great and practical features are provided.

4. You can save the video file to almost all of the common multimedia formats like SWF, MP4, AVI, WMV, MOV, RM, EXE and GIF.

5. A 30 days free try may meet your short term demand.


Cons of using Camtasia to convert PowerPoint to DVD: You need a powerful computer (higher than mainstream configuration) to run Camtasia smoothly because it consumes a lot system resources when recording PowerPoint. The recommended RAM is 2GB and the processor is 3GHz. The recording process may be freeze sometime if your PC is a dog. When burning the PowerPoint video to DVD, a third part DVD burning software is needed.


Wondershare PPT2DVD (http://www.ppt-to-dvd.com)


“If you're interested in sharing your PowerPoint presentations as DVDs to be played on a DVD player, this program gives you a simple, no-fuss way to do it. Wondershare PPT2DVD burns a completed presentation to a DVD, and includes all aspects of it, including transitions, music, videos, and so on.” From PC world, Preston Gralla.


As the first program that provides the PowerPoint to DVD solution, PPT2DVD has its own features such as:


1. The converting process is very simple and no-fuss just as Preston said, import the PowerPoint presentations into the program (you can import 12 files at a time), choose the right output format and some advanced settings if you need, then the program can convert your PowerPoint presentation to DVD without your attendance.


2. The DVD menu makes the output more easily to navigate. You can jump to the right presentation with a DVD remote control.

3. The playing mode, playing DVD automatically or manually gives you more choices when presenting your PowerPoint to your audience on TV.

4. It retains all sounds, animations, video clips and even the hyperlinks (between slides) in the output files.

5.Compared to Camtasia, an average configured is power enough for Wondershare PPT2DVD.


Compare to the first conversion method, in the converting process, you cannot figure out how will the output looks like. Just like a black box, you don’t know what happened in it. Sometimes it may lead the unpredictable failure. And, PPT2DVD can just record the elements in the PowerPoint, it is not possible for you to add your voice to your presentation, hope this function will be added in the future version.


Still, there are many other PowerPoint to DVD/video tools on the Internet like Acoolsoft PPT2DVD, E.M. Free PowerPoint Video Converter, authorSTREAM and so on. Users who are looking for the PowerPoint to DVD/video converter can have an evaluation about them.



Feb 11, 2009

Free Valentine’s Day PowerPoint templates and gift

Valentine's Day with all its charisma and magnetism is coming. We are busy with preparing Valentine’s gift for our sweetheart. Maybe some of us may not know how to express love to our beloved. Chocolates, flowers, candlelight dinner are the common programs we adopted to spend the Valentine’s Day every year. How can we make some creative ideas to spend our Valentine’s Day this year?

Making valentine day card seemed to be a wonderful idea. You can express out your sincere feelings to your lovers. Considering traditional paper ones are easy to go corrupt and not ideal for preserving and recycling, electronic ones become my choice. As it to me, I prefer using PowerPoint to form the content of my valentine card first, and then generate a video for it. Words like:

1.Comforting me when I am sad,
2.Loving me when I am mad,
3.Teaching me the meaning of love,
4.Encouraging me when I need a shove,
5.But most of all thanks for loving me.
And so on, do let him or her know our feeling.

When making PowerPoint for Valentine’s gift, we can design PowerPoint templates by ourselves, and also there are some free Valentine’s PowerPoint templates we can download, just click here to download the free Valentine’s Day PowerPoint templates



To preserve our romantic memory, we can convert our PowerPoint presentation to video then upload it to YouTube like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbrOSNsNUWo&fmt=18. Converting PowerPoint presentation to DVD and send the DVD to our beloved instead of paper may retain the romantic memory forever! Here every one, show our inspiration with our Valentine’s Day gift and have a happy Valentine’s Day!

Feb 6, 2009

Valentine's Gift idea--Watch your own Love Story Movie

Valentine's Day with all its charisma and magnetism is coming. Although we can send gift and shower love to our sweetheart all year round, we still need to grasp this perfect occasion to express our love and warm heart to beloved as we may especially be busy occupying our jobs during the economic recession.

During this romantic season, we are showered with tons of romantic gifts ideas and Valentine's Day celebration tips each year. After several years, we still wonder what would be the best gift and dating method to enjoy the Valentine's Day. Flowers (especially roses with scarlet color) would fade and be pale after several days. Chocolates will make you become fat and can't be preserved long too. And we do not like soft toys, gift baskets, candles and sweets. We can't afford for luxurious diamonds, perfume, watches, jewelry.

Are you distressed by lacking of gift idea too?

I hope the idea would inspire you after following Lily's experience and story.
Menu to Choode Play Mode

Story Begin:

My boyfriend is my classmate during college. Several years have passed. Many harmony memory and pictures left for us to memorize.

I decided to make a digital photo album to tell the love history about us and enjoy it on Valentine's Day after dinner, as:

  • There are many pictures preserved on our PC since we are passionate about making excursions/trips and taking photos on holiday or weekend;

  • My sweetheart presented me a TOSHIBA laptop as Christmas gift which comes with Ulead DVD MovieFactory for TOSHIBA Launcher and DVD burner. It empowers me to make DVD from pictures and videos easily.

  • It preserves longer and it also would be a good fortune for your future generation to know the life you once lead.

Through recollecting the history and impressive story between you and your beloved, I believe that:

  • Romance would fill the air;

  • Scintillating passions of love would come alive;

  • Loving hearts would come closer;

  • It should help us to cherish each other and walk through the economic crisis season smoothly hand in hand.

At the beginning, I planned to create DVD photo album using Ulead DVD MovieFactory for TOSHIBA. After evaluating, it is really a time-consuming task to compile all the memorable pictures and set the proper transition one by one.

In fact, I am a big preserver of memories. I am used to making photo albums using PowerPoint 2007 after each journey or trip, as it enables you to adjust contrast and brightness of each picture, add captions and GIF decorations freely, and set transitions and animations at your will. Frantic, I searched in Google and find a tool which can convert presentations to DVD. You can also Google PPT to DVD and evaluate them to find the suitable PowerPoint converters which came to your eyes. Wondershare smart PPT2DVD converter is recommended.

After getting the tool, I just imported the presentations, chose the TV standard by selecting country, designed the DVD layout and another click to directly burn a DVD, my project is well on its way to completion. It effectively handles all the features I used in PowerPoint presentation. No animations, transitions and sound effect were blown away. I can even control the slide if only I chose the manual mode.

At last, I put 8 presentations on the first DVD. And we are classmate during college. Therefore, I put the campus life and the scenery there as the first chapter. I also recorded a song named Missing You in English as the DVD menu background music. Here below are the DVD menus and screenshots.
First Four EventsLast Four Events

  • Our campus life

  • Our first Valentine

  • Our seaside happiness

  • Our hometown tripsⅠ

  • Our hometown tripsⅡ

  • Our engaged ceremony

  • Our first anniversary

  • Our Hawaii dream

Here below are some other tips for you to follow.

  • Optimize the pictures by changing the contrast, brightness and removing dreaded "red eyes". Picasa is a good choice to edit your pictures.

  • Arrange your pictures in chronological order.

  • You can add some gif decorations to your slideshow.

  • You can record some sweet words in the presentations.

  • You can also record a song if you are the musician type.

Enjoy it!

To reminisce the good times you and your beloved have passed through, may you have a fantastic and freak Valentine's Day!

In the same way, you can create your own digital scrapbook for preserving, photo slide show for family events or reunion, or digital photo album for preserving and sharing.

Enjoy this, share it.

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