Presentation Sharing using the NovaMind 5 Presenter

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Transcript is as follows:

In this presentation, we will talk about what else you can do with your presentation slides besides giving a presentation within NovaMind Platinum. We will talk about four things: printing handouts, exporting your slides as images, creating presentations from the slides in other software, and recording your presentation as a video that you can share it or upload it to Youtube.

Firstly, let’s talk about printing handouts. Handouts can be useful for your audience to either follow along with your presentation, or so they have a permanent reminder of the content after the presentation is over.

To print handouts, either use the print button on the slides panel, or the Print Slides menu option.

You will see a standard print panel, but with extra options specific to printing your slides and handouts.

The first item is the range of slides that you want to print. You can print either all of them, or just specific slides, and you have the option of whether to include the introductory slide or not.

Then you can select the content that you want included. If you choose to include the background then any colored background or texture image on the background of the slide will be printed. If you leave this option off, then the slide will be printed as if it was on white paper, and any automatic colored text will be adjusted accordingly.

If you choose the option to include a border, a box will be drawn around the slide in the color you select, or black if you don’t explicitly select anything else.

If you choose the Hide topic text option, then the slides will be printed without any text on the topics. This can be very handy if you want to print handouts for your audience to fill in during your presentation. Having your audience fill in the Mind Map during the presentation is a good aid to their memory because they are getting visual, audio, and kinesthetic learning, and also have the option of recording the information in their own words, and extending the Mind Map with their own thoughts.

The next section is the page content. In this area, you choose the number of slides to put on each page, and whether to include lines for people to write notes on. The preview below this section shows how the page will be configured, and also reflects whether you are printing in landscape or portrait orientation.

The other options for headers and footers are the same as normal printing options, so we won’t go into those here.

Now let’s talk about exporting slides. You may well want to export each of your presentation slides as images for use in other programs, or to share on a web site, or give to other people for some other purpose.

You can either use the File / Export option on the menu, or use the presentation slides panel context menu to export the slides. If you are using the main menu, you can export just the slides selected in the presentation slides panel by holding down the Option key while using the export menu (you will see the title of the menu item change accordingly). If you want to use the presentation slides panel directly, just right click on it and you will be able to export from there, and if you have any slides selected, you will also be able to export just the selected slides.

When you export slides, an open panel will be shown, allowing you to select the folder in which you want to put your slide images. You don’t need to worry about the contents of this folder, since the export creates a new folder within the selected folder for the exported images. The new folder will be named according to the name of the NovaMind file you are exporting from if you have saved it, or the title of the first Mind Map in the file. If a file or folder of that name already exists, it will start adding numbers after the name until it finds an unused name, and then creates that folder, so as to not disturb anything already there. The slides are exported to the newly created folder, and at the end of the export process, that folder is opened in the Finder.

When you export, you will be given some options like this. The first section allows you to choose which slides to include in the export. If you have chosen to export only selected slides, the Slides option will already be selected, and the slide numbers field will already be pre-populated with the slides you had selected.

If you choose to include the intro slide, then the title and subtitle will be used according to your presentation setup, and if you have checked the “Help spread the word” option, there will be a small “Created using NovaMind” text in the bottom right corner of the intro slide image.

If you export the intro slide, it will be numbered 0 in the exported file names, and each other slide will be named according to the slide number.

When you export, you can set the size of the files that are produced either according to the popup, or if you choose the custom size, you will be able to set the width and height in the text fields below the popup.

In the options, you can choose to export the Mind Map background as part of the image, in which case, the images get produced with the backgrounds you have set for those Mind Maps. If you choose this option, and also produce an intro slide, the intro slide will be colored according to the average color of the first Mind Map’s background, and the text will be either black or white, according to the most contrasting color for the background that is used.

If you decide not to export with the background, the image produced will have a transparent background, so that you can include it in other presentation software like Keynote or Powerpoint. There are two options if you are exporting without a background: Export for light background and Export for dark background. This determines the coloring of automatic colored text and link lines – the automatic coloring will be white if you choose to export for a dark background, or black if you are exporting for a light background. This means it will show up nicely when you place it in your other documents.

Now let’s take the exported slides and create presentations in other software. Firstly, Keynote.

Create a Keynote presentation using the theme you want to use.

Select all the exported slide images, and drag them onto the slides sidebar. Make sure you drag it on to the sidebar itself and not on to a slide.

All the added slides will be selected as you can see from the yellow border.

You may see that there are other things on the slides as well as the images. To get rid of them, go into the Masters section and choose Blank.

Select the transition you want to use. Usually a dissolve looks good.

And that’s it!

So it’s pretty easy to get your slides into Keynote, but a little more difficult to get them into Powerpoint. This method requires Powerpoint 2008 or later.

Open Automator in your Applications folder.

When Automator opens, you’ll see a “Choose a type for your document” dialog. Click “Application” then click “Choose”.

In the search box next to “Variables” type “Ask for Finder Items” (the Actions item should be selected).

Drag “Ask for Finder Items” to the right, into the workflow area and put a check next to “Allow Multiple Selection” in the “Ask for Finder items” item you just added.

Go back to the search box and type “Create PowerPoint Picture Slide Shows”. Add that item to the workflow.

Choose File | Save. Give the Automator application a name and save it to any convenient location.

Whenever you want to create presentations from your slides, double click the application, choose the images you want to use and click Choose.

It will create the presentation for you from the slides, and you can edit it in Powerpoint.

To record your presentation as a video, you can either use the free Quicktime Player application that comes with MacOS X, or use a third party video capture application. Personally, I use ScreenFlow for capturing and editing the videos, since it has what I consider to be the best range of features, and is very powerful while still being easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. If you already have ScreenFlow or some other video capture software, I assume you will know how to use it, and will be able to capture and edit your videos quite easily, so we will concentrate here on capturing using the free Quicktime Player application.

Normally you will want your presentation to be a particular size for viewing – especially if you are planning to share it on YouTube or use it on a projector. We therefore recommend that you use the option to do the presentation in a window rather than full screen. Typically if you want to share on YouTube, you would use either HD 1080 (preferred) or HD 720, and if you are going to use it on a projector you’d want to check the resolution of the projector, but the latest good quality projectors are capable of HD 1080 resolution too. For the purposes of this presentation, we will capture at a smaller size so that you can see the way we select what to capture.

If you want to have an audio track with your presentation, it is very difficult to get your audio right the first time, so we would recommend creating the audio track first, and then doing the screen recording. You can record audio directly in QuickTime Player, but this has only limited editing capabilities, so we would recommend using more sophisticated software for this if you are doing a reasonable size presentation – for example Audacity, which is free software, and very capable. You would export your sound file from Audacity (usually as an AIFF or MP3 rile) and open it in QuickTime Player.

Start your presentation in windowed mode at the size you want, then switch to QuickTime Player, and choose the File / New Screen Recording menu. You will see a window for your recording with a record button on it. Before you start recording, click on the down arrow button at the right side of that window, and choose what you want to use for sound – if you have done as we suggested and recorded your audio separately, select None – you will add the audio later. If however you want to narrate as you go, you will want to have the microphone selected. For the other options, you are in most cases best to leave the quality setting on high, and you probably don’t want to use the option to show the mouse clicks seeing as you will highlight the topics directly in the presentation.

If you are using a windowed presentation as suggested, drag your recording area to exactly match the size of your presentation window.

If you are using a pre-recorded audio file, then start your audio playing, and go through your presentation in time with the recording. When you have finished recording, you can either press the Stop Recording option in the menu bar, or use Control+Command+Esc to finish recording.

Now you can drag your audio on to the screencast to add it as the soundtrack, and export the whole thing as a ready to go presentation, or use the built in Share options if your version of Quicktime has this option.