Video Killed the Presentation Star: Don’t Go Blank On Your Audience
There you are up in front of an expectant audience, buck naked, without a script, and you open your mouth and nothing comes out.
That’s the standard presentation nightmare, though if you eat a lot of cheese before you go to bed, sometimes you get the enhanced version in which the audience consists entirely of llamas in lederhosen.
As you know, that sort of thing rarely happens in actual life. But the next worst thing happens all the time: you go to show an audience your thrilling video, and it’s NOT THERE.
Just a big empty black box in your PowerPoint.
You click and click, hoping that the laptop’s just running low on available memory.
“Just bear with me,” you say. “Any second now.”
But there’s nothing. So today we’re going to look at the two main sources of on-site video trauma for presenters.
1. Embedded Video Not There
When you insert a video clip into PowerPoint, it doesn’t become part of the presentation file like a picture does. It’s just a link to somewhere else on your computer.
AV technicians spend much of their life trying to help presenters who have copied their PPT file across to a USB stick, brought it along to the show, and are wondering where their video or audio clips went.
If you’re not using your own computer for the presentation, you have to copy all the video and audio files into one folder on the USB stick or disc. Then when you load it onto the on-site computer, make sure the links are still working. Get there early, before there’s an audience in the room.
If you are using your own computer, check that the linked video files are actually on your machine, not on the server back at the office.
2. Is it really a DVD?
“I’m bringing a DVD” can mean a lot of things these days.
There’s your ‘classic’ DVD: a video program using DVD encoding, like you rent from Blockbuster. You stick it in a DVD player, and it plays.
Then there’s video files burned on a blank DVD. It says ‘DVD’, but it’s not programmed like a movie DVD. It’s just another form of file storage. So you stick the disc in the rented DVD player in your trade show booth, and nothing happens.
There are two ways to check what you’re dealing with.
One is to stick it in a DVD player - an actual playback deck rather than the DVD player on your laptop. if it brings up an on-screen menu and plays, it’s a DVD and will work pretty much anywhere.
The safest option is to look at the disk in your file management program. Actual DVD’s have a distinctive-looking file structure, with separate video and audio directories, like this:
If it looks like this, it’s just video files stored on a DVD disc, not a universally playable DVD:
To complicate things, some DVD players will read other file formats and play them. But some won’t, and that introduces a scary level of uncertainty if you’re travelling around using rented AV gear.
When in doubt, ask your AV people what to do, well in advance of the event. That way, there’s time to get the DVD properly authored so you can sleep as peacefully as your hotel room allows.
Tags: DVD, PowerPoint video
Ian Whitworth believes passionately in the power of live communication, without the buzzwords and bullet points. He works as a creative director and principal of agency A Lizard Drinking. He is also one of the founders of audiovisual company Scene Change. Ian is an ex-professional presenter and long ago, ex-audiovisual technician. For non-presentation stuff, try @ianwhitworth. 
