New uses for PowerPoint

I hear a lot about "Outgrowing" PowerPoint. I will be the first to admit that there PowerPoint does have some short falls in the worship setting, and it certainly has come graphic weakness, most notably, the animations are somewhat limited... but I have recently started doing something that I have not heard a great deal about, and I am wondering if anyone else has tried it, or other things.

This year, I have begun creating powerpoint movies, if you will. Literally, I will create a graphic, copy the slide, moving the graphic slightly, then copy the new slide, and again, move the graphic. I can then run the presentation between 3 and 4 slides per second, creating a movie like effect.

By doing this, I am able to create our churches theme rotating in the presentation and this morning, caused a football player to run down the field during the sermon "The Super Bowl of Joy." It is a lot of work creating 200 slides for one minute, but the effect is nice

Have others tried something like this? Steve
Posted by Steve Goad on Jan 28, 2001.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey, that's a great idea, Steve! Very original. I, too, would be interested to hear if others are "thinking laterally" and maximizing the use of PowerPoint. While it's true that PPT can start to loose it's effect after a while, the cold hard fact is that most churches do not have the time or resources to deliver presentations by any other means. It seems to me that you are making extra efforts to take full advantage of the tools you have to work with. I think that is the key when using any type of delivery system. There is a tendency to get into a routine when creating presentations, especially when time is a precious commodity. Maybe this thread could help stir the imaginations of Tech-Talkers. Send in your cool ideas!

-Tim
Posted by Tim Eason on Jan 28, 2001.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am a full-time Children's Pastor at First Assembly of God in Bessemer, Alabama. When I came here two years ago, our church had just bought a projector and was using a 486 machine to run Bravo. Now we have gravitated to PowerPoint and more powerful hardware.
One of the ideas our Pastor has had is to take words to songs and overlay them on background video (ie, Creation Calls, Vineyard Music with different video from God's creation). I struggled in trying to figure out how to make this work due to the fact that chorus and verses are not the same every time and that sometimes we repeat choruses or verses. So using actual tape was out. One idea we had was to edit the video with words overlay in a frame rate that the computer can run smoothly (15fps) and save as an avi file. Making the avi long enough (or looping) to account for extended chorus etc. We would then import the avi into PowerPoint and set it to play automatically. I have tested this idea and it did work except in the transitions to the next slide or any slide. The screen would flash black for a split second before beginning the avi.
Any suggestions to improve the idea, etc? We want to take several of our songs and edit video to sync with the words.
Posted by Chris Argo on Jan 28, 2001.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An easier way to make movies with Powerpoint is to use Shockwave. Assuming you've got a fairly recent version of Windows running on the computer you should have the shockwave player automatically on your system. You can imbed a shockware .SWF movie into your powerpoint. This gives you a lot of control over the animation and capabilities beyond what you can do generically with Powerpoint. Of course, you would need to invest in Flash in order to create the animations.
Posted by Jim Klinck on Feb 6, 2001.

Be careful when you use Flash/Shockwave in Powerpoint. In my experience with both PowerPoint 2000 and XP it caused a I/O error 6 when trying to open other Powerpoint files. This can be resolved using Microsoft Office Update. Before trying to embed Flash or Shockwave into Powerpoint make sure you have the latest updates and service packs for your version of PPT. You can learn more about inserting Flash into powerpoint at:
http://www.flashgeek.com/tutorials/index.htm

If i'm not mistaken doesn't the new PowerPoint XP version have ways to set paths for items to follow. Such as if you wanted an item to leave the screen, but you wanted it to first spin around something and then fly off to one of the corners. I believe that you can set it's path.

[tomrwilliams]

I've been using PPT XP for about a year now, creating lots of animated images and text. (We don't have a live band, so I synchronize the slides with MP3 split trax). The animation capabilities in XP are pretty awesome compared to the previous versions of PPT. The one I use most often is fade in and fade out. It's very smooth, you can vary the speed at which things fade in and out, and you can fade and move and jiggle and spin multiple items at the same time.

I've done some of the same things to create motion in power point. A slow zoom into a picture creates the feel of movement. You can set the zoom rate to as slow as you want, using the time line feature. I've also experimented with copying images multiple times and moving them slightly to get a motion effect. It is tedious but it does work.

[Phyllis Cantrel]

We are useing Sony camera, camcorder and a Sony VAIO computer to put together movies to add to our powerpoint presentations. I also use Movie Maker and Adobe to help with the setup. Most of the work is in slide prep. I don't hold back in any way on what I find to use for material. The team comes up with lots of fantastic ideas that we are soon planning to employ.

[Phyllis Cantrel]

TomWilliams,
Please email (Phyllis Cantrell) about animation design.
Thank you