Uploading PPT to Sync with Video

[barberm]

We are developing a web-based application that will need to be able to
allow users to upload a powerpoint presentation and a separate video
file to a website. Once both are uploaded, they should be able to sync
them together so that as the video plays, the video will trigger the
powerpoint to go the next slide. Essentially, when they load the
presentation, they can watch the video online and set when the
powerpoint transitions. The end product will be a fully loaded webcast
that can be viewed online at anytime. The trick is to make this as
absolutely brain-dead easy as possible otherwise it won't get used. We
have considered flash, silverlight, and others and all timing being
managed through XML. Any ideas or suggestions on how to implement?

 

[Carmen Ferrara]

We are developing a web-based application that will need to be able to
allow users to upload a powerpoint presentation and a separate video
file to a website. Once both are uploaded, they should be able to sync
them together so that as the video plays, the video will trigger the
powerpoint to go the next slide. Essentially, when they load the
presentation, they can watch the video online and set when the
powerpoint transitions. The end product will be a fully loaded webcast
that can be viewed online at anytime. The trick is to make this as
absolutely brain-dead easy as possible otherwise it won't get used. We
have considered flash, silverlight, and others and all timing being
managed through XML. Any ideas or suggestions on how to implement?

You are going to have to build some sort of web based synching tool -
the interface could be a bit tricky. Basically, you have the video
file in a player on one side and the PPT slides on the other side with
a timeline widget below. As the video file plays, you can have a
"Synch Next Slide" button, that saves the current time to the
database, loads up the next slide in the Slide area, and sets a marker
on the timeline. There are lots of things to consider in building
something like this for the web.

Video uploads could take quite a while. Do you need to support
multiple video formats (avi, wmv, mov, flv, mp4, etc) - if so you'll
need to convert on the server which takes considerable server
resources to re-encode video. Same with PPT - will you convert slides
to images so you can load into your "synch" tool. All of this is
pretty tough to do on the web, but I'm sure its doable.

For web interface ideas take a look at slideshare.net - it is sort of
a social networking site for PowerPoint presentations. But I believe
they have a feature that allows you to synch up audio with PPT.

If you're interested in exploring other options, I recently released a
desktop tool called Presio, which allows users to synchronize
virtually any media file with PowerPoint slides or images and publish
to a webcast format.

Here are some examples of the types of webcasts you can create with
Presio:
http://ipresent.net/Presio/examples.php

Good luck.

Carmen-
http://www.ipresent.net

 

[Austin Myers]

If you will contact me off line (email) I may have a solution for you.


Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

Provider of PFCPro, PFCMedia and PFCExpress
www.playsforcertain.com