It’s no secret that I love media rich presentations. It is easy to lose focus and make something that is pretty, but not effective. Video is one of the tools you can use to enhance the impact of your presentation, but it must be used carefully. One should not simply include a video because it is “cool,” no different than one should include animations, sound effects, or other elements simply because they are “cool”. Taking a step back from the tool itself for a moment let’s briefly think about presentation design.
When I construct a slide deck I keep Nancy Duarte’s 5 Rules for Creating Great Presentations in mind. If you don’t know her name, you absolutely know her work. She and her company Duarte, Inc have created incredible, inspiring, informative, and impactful presentations for Twitter, ESPN, Cisco, Food Network as well as being one of the flag bearers for the presentation revolution which has dramatically changed the way people see what a PowerPoint can be. Duarte, Inc also made the only PowerPoint to ever win an Academy Award! They created the presentation that Al Gore used during An Inconvenient Truth. I realize there’s more to the documentary than the presentation, but seriously the presentation was outstanding and definitely had a hand in the impact the film made.
Nancy Duarte 5 rule’s are:
- Treat your audience as king.
- Spread ideas and move people.
- Help them see what you are saying.
- Practice design, not decoration.
- Cultivate healthy relationships with your slides — and your audience.
Rules 2, 3, and 4 are all directly relevant to today’s topic, using video in a presentation.
Rule 2, spread ideas and move people.
Images can be emotionally impactful. Emotional impact can urge people to action. Videos are moving images. Videos that emotionally impact people can urge them to strong action. The caveat is that a video which is boring tends to be boring even longer than a boring slide or image.
Rule 3, help them see what you are saying.
I teach a first aid class for motorcyclists. The purpose of the class is to give them the skills to save their life or the life of a riding companion immediately following a severe accident. A treatable, but still major life threat is arterial bleeding. I can describe arterial bleeding and tell the audience how quickly I could bleed out. Every time I have taught the class there’s a light bulb moment when I show a video of a major artery being cut. It’s graphic and it’s undeniable.
Rule 4, practice design, not decoration.
Make sure that if you are including a video it is essential to and effective at further your objectives. It is easy to include a lot of things in presentations that are extra and burdening the audience consciously or subconsciously.
Here are my 5 tips for using video to enhance your presentation.
Store the video locally
- Have the video stored on your hard drive along with your presentation. Don’t allow yourself to be crippled by lack of wifi, slow wifi, or broken links. Minimizing a presentation to open a browser breaks the flow and distracts the audience. Imbed that video directly in to your presentation and have it play automatically. You can introduce the video and then advance to the slide with the video so it seamlessly begins to play.
There should only be one narrator
- If the video already has a narrator and the narration is good let that narrator speak. If you have any concerns about the narration, mute the video and provide your own narration. Practice this so it is smooth.
Videos should generally be under 1 minute long
- We’ve all heard about shortened attention spans and such. In an age when people get bored during a 30 second commercial (or a 6 second ad before a YouTube video) a 3 minute video in your presentation will seem like an eternity. Consider editing your video to shorten it, cutting out dead space, or separating it in to several smaller clips. Pull up any movie trailer and make note of how quickly scenes change, things happen, etc. Odds are you’ll find something happens every 3-6 seconds. Use that same benchmark for your videos and limit the overall length of the video.
Video should be the best way to accomplish what you are trying to do
- If you are including a video because it is easy just seems neat, don’t. If you can do a live demo or even better, let people get their hands on the product go that route. Granted demos come with their own set of challenges they can be a great tool.
Make sure the video is high quality
- A video that looks a little pixelated on your computer will look a lot pixelated on a high def TV or projector. 480p, 720p, or 1080p should all look very good. The higher the quality of the video, the larger the file will be, and potentially the harder it will be for your computer to smoothly play it. You may have to find a balance between quality and compression.
Agree? Disagree? Suggestions? Let me know! @ExpressiveIO
If you want to know more about Nancy Duarte’s 5 Rules you can watch this video and she will explain them to you herself.
