Are any of you using Powerpoint with linked narration WAV files in your museums to produce self-playing continuous loop programs for viewing screens or kiosks? If so, would you care to share any observations regarding use of the program, software for recording (Audacity, etc.), and method and timing of slide advance (ie: user selected manual advance, timing setting with each slide, or other methods of slide advance). Linking slides voice files is a lot more critical than slides shown with music, as there is the need to maintain pace in the presentation without coming up with too many noticable "dead spots". I am curious whether anyone has any helpful hints gained through experience that they would be willing to share.

PC

I tried this once and it was frustrating. Powerpoint is not good for this application. The sounds must be timed from the beginning of the slide. I found problems if I attempted to animate the slide.

I would look for other methods of creating visual presentation with sound.

There are some things video does better than any other medium. Your use case is one of them.

If for some reason you can't use video, I would default to a more programmatic solution... something like Adobe Director.

Apple's Keynote is a bit more flexible than PowerPoint, but neither are ideal for this kind of application... as I am reminded each time I visit a museum trying to do it. :-)

Rob

Do not listen to robertjohndavis or softwerkslex it can be done, as I have done it. Hell people looked froward to my Power Point presentations in school, I implemented WAV, midi, animated .gif, and video. Narration is ease to do you can implement it different ways depending on what you want to do.

Take a look at ProShow Gold from Photodex. I'm told it's used by several presenters at Winterrail. I've used it for several presentations that loop on flat screen monitors at our display during the LA County Fair.

Regards,

Clyde Stoneman
Southern California Chapter,
Railway & Locomotive Historical Society.

There is also a reputable open-source alternative called Impress.
http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html

This comes out of the open-source community so the development process is significantly different. You never know what will arise from that, but it costs nothing but time to eval.

Thank you all for the very informative responses. The project at hand involves the updating and automation of an existing manually presented PowerPoint program produced in the 2003 format, consequently completely rebuilding the program in another software was not an attractive option as it would alter the look and content of the program, as well as possibly require substitutions for some graphics, or other alterations in the program appearance.

I was able to spend some time working on this project last night and found that PowerPoint will play the WAV files very accurately, but the starting point is the slide advance as was mentioned, and the disadvantage is that you need to have it decided already what kind of slide transition you will use because they take varying amounts of time and with a longer transition the narration may be running before the image becomes fully evident.

PowerPoint does have some problems with music playback differences between computers, where the slides advance automatically while a music file plays. Depending on the computer being used, this can result in a couple seconds difference in slide advance vs. music at the end of a three or four minute music segment. The common way of "hiding" this and making the program more adaptable to various computers is usually to use a slow dissolve for the last slide of a music sequence so the variation in music ending is less evident.

I downloaded Audacity and it works very well for producing and editing WAV narration files to use with PowerPoint. If you download it (freeware) be sure to decline all the other download options they offer, or your computer will be loaded with advertising garbage and useless tool bars. You can compensate for slide transition timing differences by delaying the start of the narration a second or two for the longer transitions, and that delay is measured and displayed by the recording trace.

So far this is going well. I will see if that is consistent throughout the setup.

I have ProShow Gold on my computer, it is a very capable program but I generally do not use it unless there is no other suitable choice for the intended project. I do not know of any organization in my business environment that uses it for anything, consequently the time spent working with it and learning from it is pretty much lost as far as any other business applications are concerned.

PC

Yes, please don't listen to me. I know nothing about interactive and multimedia presentations....