PRESENTATIONS
Presentation Software can be a powerful tool and over the many events and conferences we have had the pleasure of supporting, we have collected some tips and tricks to share with you here! Read on . . .
PRESENTATION SOFTWARE
Powerpoint, Powerpoint, Powerpoint. While we do work with a large number of programs such as Prezi, Canva, or Slides, we recommend Powerpoint in all use cases. It is the most capable across platforms and every technician knows how to use it to your full advantage!
VISUAL DESIGN
Choose High Contrast Colours
Use Large Fonts
Safe area - Try not to put anything important within 2 cm of the top, bottom, left or right of the canvas.
FONTS
Please embed your fonts when saving your powerpoint file. This ensures your text will be displayed properly on any machine.
To embed fonts in PowerPoint, go to File > Options > Save, and under "Preserve fidelity when sharing this presentation," check the box for "Embed fonts in the file". You can then choose to embed only the characters used or embed all characters for wider editing compatibility, which increases the file size.
IMAGES
These days we all have the ability to capture and share beautiful high quality images.
Having too many large images in a powerpoint can affect its playback ability.
Where possible we recommend using files no larger than 1920x1080 pixels. Within Powerpoint you can compress your images for smoother playback, see instructions here from Microsoft:
VIDEOS
We work with videos all the time and there are a few different things to consider.
If your video is 150mb or smaller in size, you can ember this in Powerpoint and playback should be fine. You will want to check on options such as, what happens when you get to the slide with the video - we recommend having the video autoplay as soon as Powerpoint gets to that slide. You can always create a buffer slide to show before the video to remind you it's coming up.
If your video is larger than 150mb, we recommend playing the video on a separate dedicated machine with professional cueing and playback software. Our recommended format is 1920x1080p h.264 MP4 or MOV container.