This weekend I used Slideshare for the first time to record an overview slideshow for RainStor. Rather than just uploading the PPT, we felt it would be more compelling and easier to follow by having a voice over track with the slides.
The whole process was fairly simple once I figured out the best way to record and create an MP3 voice over using Audacity. At first I thought that I could just ad lib and voice over as if I was doing the presentation to an analyst. However as I soon discovered, I got remarkably finicky and perfectionist about each um and ah I was making. Plus no matter how hard I tried, I’d make a tongue twisting self conscious mistake that I couldn’t live with. After messing around with Audacity and trying to edit out the errors in the audio file and cutting and pasting segments together, I decided the best thing to do was to script it out first and also add the notes to the notes section of each slide in the PPT. Ironically this also served the benefit of having the script accompany any downloaded versions of the PPT, so I should have thought to do this in the first place!
Once I scripted it out, it took less than 30 minutes to record the 11 minute segment. I had aimed to have it around 10 mins so I was pretty pleased with the result.
If you’ve never used Slideshare before, you upload your PPT and then you can add a voice track to it which must be an MP3 file. Use Audacity, which is a free program. If you are using Windows Vista, you’ll have to download and make available the lame.dll (hey it’s open source, what do you expect for free :-)). When you upload the MP3 file, Slideshare then allows you to “line up” your audio segments to the correct slide using a visual tool. You slide the markers where the audio segments should be played for the beginning and ending of each slide. So when you are recording your MP3 file using Audacity remember to leave a small gap between slides so that you can transition nicely between each slide.
Once everything is synchronized you can now publish to the world (or privately to your select audience).
When I listened to my recording, I can still hear a few errors here and there, but even as a perfectionist Virgo I can live with it.
If you have 11 mins take a listen below and let me know what you think. If you have any questions about Slideshare email me and I’ll be happy to answer them or give you more tips if you need them. Of course you can just watch one of the many Slidecasts about creating Slidecasts such as this popular one.