Chapter 8: Tips and Tricks
This section gives you a number of guidelines that you should follow when you are creating a presentation with RealPresenter. If you use these hints, you will get the best results from your presentations.
Before You Record
Preparing your equipment goes a long way towards creating an effective presentation. You might want to create a short test recording of your video image and your voice. Then view the recorded sample to make sure your audio and video recording devices are set correctly.
Check the following before you begin recording a presentation:
- Is your camera focused and positioned correctly so that you appear centered in the video window?
- How is the lighting? Are there unwanted shadows on your face?
- Is your microphone positioned correctly? When speaking into the microphone, do you see the audio level registering? The audio level should not hit the top of the meter, but stay in the middle of the range as you speak.
- Are your computer's speakers turned off? If they are on, you can get feedback (a painful screeching noise) during your recording with a microphone. Your speakers can also be disabled in the Windows Volume Control, if you cannot easily turn them off.
During Your Recording
When you are recording your presentation, keep the following tips in mind. If you are creating a live presentation, you will want to record a test run using these suggestions.
- Look into the camera regularly during your presentation, not at your own image on the screen. This help you to make eye contact with your audience.
- Spend time on each slide or Web page. If you click too fast, some of these changes may not appear for the audience. Spend five to ten seconds minimum per page.
- Wait a few seconds before you begin talking after you start recording. The text on the toolbar will turn red and indicate the recording has begun, and the timer counter will start running. If you talk too soon, your audience may not hear the first few words you say.
- Also try not to talk between slide or Web page changes. A break in audio makes editing your work much easier.
- Keep in mind there is no "pointer" for your presentation. Your audience can't see your mouse pointer, so you must talk to the audience to point out main topics.
- If you are interrupted during a non-live presentation, you can simply "pause" to temporarily stop the recording. Pressing "pause" again resumes the presentation. Note that pausing doesn't exist for a live presentation, but for a recorded presentation, this method may help you.
- Avoid launching external programs while you are recording/broadcasting a presentation. Doing so may cause interruptions in the recording when viewed by your audience.
- Once you press the Stop button, record a few seconds of silence. The Audio/Video stream takes a few seconds to shutdown, and it's possible for unwanted noises to end up in the presentation.
Other Presentation Tips
- When you enter the description for a presentation, add enough information to help your audience. This becomes especially useful if you have many presentations saved on your computer. See "Chapter 6: Reviewing, Editing, and Publishing Your Presentations" for more information.
- Audiences can only view your locally published presentations if your local RealServer is running. Leave the server running when you know others will be viewing your presentations. For instructions on turning off your local RealServer, see "Shutting Down the Local RealServer".
- Long presentations (longer than 30 minutes) can be managed more easily if you break them up into multiple shorter presentations.
- If you create a presentation that contains two streams, where one of the streams is the lower bandwidth stream (for example, 28.8K or 56K Audio-only stream), you will want to serve this presentation on a higher-powered system. A 300 MHz Pentium II processor with 64 megabytes of memory would be the minimum for this sort of presentation.
PowerPoint Tips
Keep the following tips in mind when you are creating PowerPoint presentations.
Web Tour Tips
Keep the following tips in mind when you are creating Web Tour presentations.
- Add the URLs you will visit during your Web Tour presentation to the bookmark list, or favorites list in your Web browser. You can then navigate easily from one page to the next during the presentation.
- When you navigate within a Web page (page up or down, scrolling, or clicking on links that go to another part of the page), make sure you tell your audience what you are doing if it is important. They cannot see this type of intra-page navigation.
- If you display a Web page where you have to enter text, anything you type won't show for your audience. If entering text is important to your audience, tell them what they should enter. Unless you have a very specific reason to do so, try to avoid text forms in your presentations.
- Remember that the audience viewing your Web Tour presentation may be using a different Web browser than you. Visit pages that work with all major browsers.
- Avoid using Web pages that require the use of external programs (plug-ins, for example) or pop-up windows. Your audience may not have the required programs and, therefore, may not experience the same effect when viewing your presentation.
- For Web pages with frames, consider using only the URL for the frame you want to show.
- Web pages change often. If you use external Web pages (that you have no control over) in your recorded presentations, be aware that their content may change with little or no warning. If this happens, your presentations may contain broken links. Viewers will still receive your audio and video stream, but the URLs you visited will show an error message.
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This file last updated on 07/27/00 at 16:51:29.