I Was An Audience Guest at Microsoft’s Office.com “The Office 15-Minute Webinar”
While at Microsoft a few weeks ago, I was able to sit in on the production of an episode of “The Office 15-Minute Webinar.”
Dave Ludwig, Chris Downs, Doug Thomas, Troy Chollar, Bruce Bracken
Doug Thomas (3rd from left) is the ring leader for the series and does a great job. I have been around a lot of video production, live events, podcast and webinar production and Doug has definitely assembled a full team and has all aspects covered. In addition to his computer, a 2nd computer viewing the webcast as any viewer does is giving audience view feedback, a professional microphone, video camera (actually the DSLR camera shooting HD through a real lens), professional audio recording system, backup video camera and crew to monitor audio, video and feed web search information are a part of every production. Doug’s previous video series was “Office Casual” and part of the theme carries over to “The Office 15-Minute Webinar” in that there is a lot of pre-planning, scenarios to handle live situations and manpower in each produciton, but he works very hard to make the production feel casual and friendly (all good things!).
– Microsoft’s Office.com division does offer a lot of good resources. This team is in the CPub (Content Publishing) area and TLC Creative Services contributed to another area last year with a series of PowerPoint video templates.
– The webinar home site is here. It airs live every Tuesday at 9:15am PT and recorded episodes are available.
– And the webinar I watched be produced was the MVP special here.
It was a fun day and great to meet the crew of “The Office 15-Minute Webinar.”
– Troy @ TLC
Another Day Backstage
2013 has been a blur so far being at 4 showsites and some personal holidays spread across multiple states (Florida, California, Detroit, Florida) and countries (US, Czech Republic, Germany, Austria). Here is my work area backstage at one of the events (still smiling).
– Troy @ TLC
Attention University of Minnesota People – here is a free UofM themed template!
We completed a project recently that involved the University of Minnesota. As part of the presentation project, we developed a great UofM themed template. Because all of the content is clear for distribution, I thought it would be good to make the full template available here.
The template is native to PPT 2010 (.pptx), 4×3 aspect ratio, and has all of the PowerPoint presets customized. Let us know if the template is useful to you!
Download here – 254KB
– Troy @ TLC
Why NOT to Use “Play Video Full Screen”
PowerPoint 2013 is now available, and multimedia has gotten even better with it, which I will cover in future posts. But one video feature that has been with PowerPoint at least since PPT 2000 is “Play Full Screen.”
When a video is inserted, one of the options is to make the video scale to fill the screen (VIDEO TOOLS >> PLAYBACK tab >> VIDEO OPTIONS section >> PLAY FULL SCREEN).
I do not recommend using this feature for a number of reasons:
– The video “pops” to full screen, which is not in line with today’s presentations full of smooth animations.
– Low resolution videos will look even lower resolution when stretched to full screen.
– If there is content on top of the video (z order is possible in PPT 2010 and above), the content is covered by the video.
– The video scales to the maximum height or width and use black bars on the top or sides (letterbox or pillar box) if video is not same aspect ratio as the screen aspect ratio (not a bad thing, but may not be desired).
– If the presentation is distributed, it is a very confusing option and may result in unexpected issues (ie. person adds text below the video, but when played it is covered).
– I have experienced this feature cause playback/animation issues.
– Last, I do not see it accomplish anything that cannot be done while developing slides or through animation.
– Troy @ TLC
Nothing to Report from the Microsoft MVP Summit
In day 3 of the Summit and day 2 of sessions with the PowerPoint program and dev team. But as you can see, I have nothing to report (except that a rare cloud failure occurred in Seattle yesterday and it was wonderful and sunny outside).
– Troy @ TLC
Greeting from Microsoft and the MVP Summit
I am in Redmond (Seattle) Washington this week at the MVP Summit. Two highlights of the week are meeting with the PowerPoint Dev team and being a part of feedback sessions and spending time with the PowerPoint MVPs!
(Glenna, Dave, Echo, Ric, Sandy, Troy, Steve, Shyam, Juno)
– Troy @ TLC
Showsite Pics From Prague
The recent show in Prague at the Hilton went great. Here is my view of things (note the super wide screen that is a permanent install along with a Pandora’s box system to create multiple PIPs, add background graphics, and more – very nice!)
International meetings have unique needs. Along with all power needing to be adapted from U.S. connectors, there is always need for live translation. For this meeting, translation was in 8 languages (English being one of them).
– Troy @ TLC