Importing Power Point into Final Cut Pro

Question

Level 1

49 points

Importing Power Point into Final Cut Pro

I have a Power Point presentation that one of my colleagues made. We then recorded voice over for it. What is the best way to export or save this presentation so that I can import it into Final Cut 7 and arrange the voice over?

2.93 GHz Intel Core i7, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Posted on Mar 24, 2011 6:41 AM

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Answer 1

Jim Cookman

Level 7

23,435 points

Mar 24, 2011 6:52 AM in response to willscarlett

You can export the powerpoint as jpegs. It's quick and easy.

But you might find that you'll want to completely re-do the slides in photoshop. Powerpoint looks like cr*p in video.

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Answer 2

darbypsnm

Level 3

730 points

Mar 24, 2011 7:30 AM in response to willscarlett

The slide approach will give the best quality but if you have any sort of animations or moves, etc. these would be lost.

It may depend on the size of your PPT project and the size of your FC project.
We have exported wmv files out of PPT(11x17)1280x720) and then converted to ProRes via flip4mac. Greatest video ever? no. But it is usually better than most SD video you can "acquire" from the web. There will be caveats to full screen HD in FC from PPT.

Other factors would be font size/design elements and title safe. 8 pt fonts usually aren't the first choice for video but could look great in PPT. If you ignore title safe you may have to shrink your slides/video to ensure they are title safe or put a full screen slide behind it. A lot of times PPT is not designed with video in mind.

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Answer 3

D Gilmore

Level 4

3,525 points

Mar 24, 2011 7:34 AM in response to willscarlett

As Jim noted you can export jpegs...

If you have to use the ppt slides then I prefer to export using PNGs in the Save As options. I've found them to play better with my FCP projects

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Answer 4

Mar 24, 2011 7:44 AM in response to willscarlett

if your final product is a PowerPoint file, edit the voice over in FCP so that you have a sound file for each page in the PowerPoint. There is no need to import anything from the PowerPoint to do this.

Edit the audio into separate clips for each page of the presentation. Export to one of the file types that PowerPoint will accept and that you have the ability to export from in Quicktime:

wma
mp3
wav
AIF

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Answer 5

Mar 24, 2011 8:17 AM in response to willscarlett

I like Gary's idea. But if you have to take the PPT into FCP for some reason, another option is using PPT's "save as movie" under the File menu.

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Answer 6

D Gilmore

Level 4

3,525 points

Mar 24, 2011 8:27 AM in response to Ann Apuladay

I would approach the save as movie option with caution Ann, doing so reduces quality, reduces the frame size to 640 x 480 and limits the length of each of the slides to a short fixed length.

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Answer 7

KidVid

Level 1

17 points

Jun 22, 2012 11:38 PM in response to willscarlett

A powerpoint file is different than a movie file because it is customly/ interactivly ran.

The suggestion to “save as movie” unter the “file movie” may work to get “video” we can work with but it might be a terrible pixelated resolution ~(640x480) compared to the beautiful “1440x1080” of todays HD projects.

Apples to Oranges:

To follow my old analogy, to get a soda out of the machine we need to convert a dollar in to four quarters. In one way, yes they are both the same but in another way the dollar bill cannot go into the machine and alow us to get what we want out of it… just as a powerpoint presentation cant go into a video editing program.

Pending Research:

“Powerpoint to video”

“Powerpoint to Final Cut Pro”

“Powerpoint to FCPX”

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Answer 8

Jun 23, 2012 12:37 PM in response to KidVid

Pretty sure if you have your computer's screen resolution set to your target resolution, powerpoint will export video at that resolution (or close to it). Always a pain dealing with these conversion (this is the voice of experience).

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Answer 9

RemekTek

Level 1

8 points

Oct 19, 2016 3:39 PM in response to willscarlett

I found the following to provide me with the best image clarity:

Either, open the PPTX file in Keynote and then Export to Quicktime, BUT choose Format: 1080p. Then import into FCPX and slice & dice and freeze frame, etc.

OR, in Powerpoint save each slide manually as a TIF using 1920x1080 size.

Both are time consuming, but at least I got the text readable! Post back to say which you found better and why.

Cheers,

Paul Szilard

RemektekMedia.com

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