Internet and Businesses Online

If you make a video slide show of your seminar, you can create additional income streams. You can sell it on CDs or DVDs both at your speeches and other seminars and over the Internet. You can sell it online as a download.

It's both simple and cheap to create a video slide show of your seminar. Here's a recipe:

Ingredients:

An audio recording of your seminar.

Your slides for the seminar.

A digital photograph of you looking into the camera.

"Utensils":

A slide presentation program such as Open Office (Star Office) Impress or Microsoft Powerpoint.

A video editing program such as Windows Movie Maker.

A computer with enough speed and disk memory.

Preparation:

Create a slide background for your presentation that includes your picture in a corner. Seeing your face will make viewing the show feel more like being present for a live presentation.

If you expect people to watch the video over the internet and you have slides with a great many bullet points or a small font size split the slides up to have fewer bullet points. Use a larger font on each. You will probably need to make the window size smaller to allow the video file to download quickly, and small text will be unreadable. If you have slide animation such as bullet points sliding in, you may need to create copies of the slide with increasing many points showing on each one. The effects won't appear in the sequences of slide images you load into the video editor.

Get an image file for each slide. Saving the slides as HTML will give you a picture of each slide. (In Open Office/Star Office, look under File>Export.)

Load the audio recording into your video editing program.

Drag the audio recording into the sound track. Edit the audio file adjusting the volume and removing periods of silence and extraneous material. You can do this, perhaps better, in an audio editing program before loading it into your video editing program.

Drag the slide pictures into your video editing program.

Drag one slide image at a time into the video track and adjust the duration to match the audio it covers. If you want to have a transition such as a dissolve from one slide to the next, make the first slide last a little past the point of transition. The next slide will start to appear overlapped with the end of its predecessor.

Write out the video slide show file. You'll have a lot of choices for output format. If you plan to have people view the videos over the web, you better go for small files, which is to say, small image size. For a DVD, you can make them considerably larger.

Put the video slide show file up on your web site for download or viewing, or make DVDs or digital CDs from the file. There are plenty of companies that will duplicate disks, label them, put them in cases with cover and side art, and shrink-wrap them for you.