Re: One Camera...or Two?/ Is powerpoint the best way?

I'd like to take this off on a different tangent for a minute. While I shoot a LOT of powerpoint stuff, I never really LIKE it.

First off, while there are a few people out there that know what they are doing, most powerpoint slide shows are horrible quality, technically speaking. Much of the blame for this I put on Microsoft. Powerpoint was and seemingly remains designed to cram a lot of visual information into a small memory footprint as the prime goal. It also was and remains oriented towards looking at it on a computer screen from arm's length away, at most.

What this gives us are graphics that come out of the starting gate with particularly poor resolution for text, compared to what comes out of a dedicated video character generator or broadcast CG software. And nowadays they are almost always projected on a large screen, though never composed for that. Often the colors and brightness levels can exceed NTSC safe levels. On top of that, the built-in "wizards" most users rely on when composing the slides, don't format the slides very well for video in a 3x4 ratio, I can't wait to see what they do for 16x9. The themes are often of poor contrast, or poor color choices, the font default choices are bad for video, and they may add a lot of distracting stuff.

You can get around a lot of this if you are an experienced presenter. You can build better custom themes and backgrounds yourself, either in Powerpoint or Photoshop, and use powerpoint as just the shell mechanism for transporting and presenting the image stream. Won't be as compact a file done that way, but can look WAY prettier. There are also services and artists out there that can create extraordinary and striking slides for you, using all the best principles of graphic design. I just never get to see that kind of work. If I get a really heinous slide show, sometimes I'll offer to rebuild it in PPT or just export the text data into a real CG and build better resolution "real" TV graphics. Depends on the time and budget available, and how high-visibility the project is. You have to pick the hill you want to die on, after all. Not every project deserves an Emmy-winning effort.

But leaving all that aside, there is an even bigger issue to me.

I don't think lectures with powerpoint are very good television.

I don't mean just from an entertainment perspective. I mean as effective use of our medium.
The true power of video is in the combination of sound and images, juxtaposed and combined to create more meaning together than they have alone. Its also a medium that favors broader themes and emotions, not a lot of minute detail. What I'm getting at is, there is probably a better way to communicate the same material than to tape six hours of people reading their slides to an audience that I'm pretty sure can read the slides themselves, faster. But usually, nobody is willing or able to do that work, find the time for it, or pay for it. It requires much more effort to take the client's information and synthesize a script that tells the story of that information most effectively. Powerpoint's format for organizing a presentation is also IMO a tool of the Devil. It puts the emphasis on building an orderly outline of bullet points, not on synthesizing an understanding of the material and getting that across to an audience. Not every message really fits the one-size approach of powerpoint. I feel it's use in early grade school classes as "technology training" is a horrible mistake, churning out kids that can't compose a proper report or truly organize and understand information. Ed Tufte points out places in corporate and government where these powerpoint shortcomings have led to trouble, including the Shuttle Discovery disaster.

My opinion is that ppt slide shows are often not the best way to communicate the information, just the one that people find most convenient and cheap and expedient to do. I'm not saying that every slide show has to have the quality of an epic film. Sometimes the pure data itself is so engaging to the target audience, your best strategy is to just to shut up, get out of the way and let them see the charts, graphs and tables with a minimum of distraction. I think that's an exception rather than the rule.

On the other hand, in those situations, those charts and graphs and tables could probably be communicated just as well if you just made a PDF file of them or a hypertext web page, that's self-navigating.

Ask yourself if the data on these slides couldn't just as easily be sent out as a email instead.

If that's the case, isn't it part of our duty as communication experts and facilitators to tell our clients there's a better, perhaps cheaper way to tell their story? Don't we owe that to them, to at least suggest there's a better way? Reading a book on tape is not television, nor is it usually something we should be calling effective training. What we are challenged to do in those situations is to prize out the parts of the live one on one presentation that really DO communicate and teach, and make THAT the focus of the video. The rest is detail to print out in a manual.

When people say video training doesn't work effectively, my guess is they don't really have any to start with. Not really. They have "radio with pictures". They have recorded a "book on tape". This is where somebody with experience in Instructional Design could be a great help, to get them moving in a better direction.

For more on why you should hate powerpoint as much as I do, wiki or google the terms powerpoint and Ed Tufte. For a real hoot, google the search terms "Powerpoint" + "Gettysburg Address", and see what evil can be done when the way the technology is applied is a mis-fit for the message.