Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Welcome back to the podcast!
This week’s episode: How to quickly produce DVDs in Windows Vista and Windows 7.
For the past few episodes, we have walked you through creating photo albums and presentations with music using Microsoft PowerPoint. Now it’s time to take that final leap of evolution: creating a DVD!
After putting so much time and effort into a PowerPoint presentation, you may find it difficult to turn it into a DVD. The main reason is the feature to do this just isn’t built into the application.
So what do you do when you have family members, co-workers, or even your boss asking you to turn that presentation into a DVD? If you really want it to be perfect and have the ability to control every little aspect of the DVD, there are high-end applications and even Windows Movie Maker available to help.
But let’s come back to reality. Here is a dilemma I ran into recently…
It was the night before a family get-together to celebrate my mother-in-law and father-in-law’s anniversary. Unknown to me all day while I was at work was the conversation my brother-in-law had had with my wife. During the conversation he had mentioned that it would be great if she could put together some photo collages or some sort of presentation. She had agreed, but didn’t let me know until 8:00 pm on the night before.
Even if this doesn’t exactly match your scenarios out there, you may have been approached at work for some miracle similar to this from your boss or a sales manager. I am sure your first instinct is to say, “TONIGHT?! Are you out of your mind?!” But instead what comes out is, “Sure, I would be happy to help,” even though you know you’ll probably now get no sleep at all.
Well, here’s what I did next: cracked open the laptop, picked out the images, picked out the music, and created some slides for groupings.
Then I searched my machine for some program that could create DVDs. I came across Windows Media Maker and some Ulead software that came with a video camera, both of which would take days of editing to get the DVD just right. Then I noticed this sweet little gem called Windows DVD Maker. I thought it was just going to be for burning and not editing. Turns out I was able to export some PowerPoint slides to images and drag them all in with a simple interface.
Besides the quick options that you use to define the DVD menus and play options, the thing that makes this program so fast is adding the background music. One tiny, slightly hidden feature automatically adjusts slide timings to match the length of the music you have picked.
All in all, it took longer to pick out the images and songs than it did to actually set up and burn my production-quality DVD.
Total time spent: 3 hours (although one of those was spent sitting back playing Mario Kart on the Wii while the disc actually burned).
This week’s visual tips for you are:
How to export your PowerPoint Slides to images
- Text for PowerPoint versions 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007
- Video for PowerPoint 2003
- Video for PowerPoint 2007
How to create a DVD using Windows DVD Maker
Disclaimer: Not all versions of Windows come with this program. So far it comes with Windows Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. Since Windows 7 has not yet been released, we have to speculate somewhat, but the beta version of Ultimate still has it, and I suspect Home Premium will too.
Well, that’s all for this week. So just remember: the next time you’re asked to pull a miracle out of that place we can’t mention by name right now, just sit back, have a nice cool beverage, and look like you are able to manipulate time and space, and then take all the credit!
While you’re enjoying that beverage, feel free to send us your comments at www.productiveupodcast.com, visit us on Twitter @productiveUcast, or write a review of our podcast on iTunes.
See you next time!
