Beyond Power Point for Client Presentations

[Claudio Branch]

Anybody out there know of any good resources for doing client presentations using something besides Power Point?

 

I believe PP is an adequate presentation tool, but in my experience, it's limitations become evident when incorporating large animation files. We are constantly facing this dilemma: The media player will play the file fine, but PP can't.

 

Perhaps using a dual screen setup with one commited to PP and the other a DVD player would be a reasonable solution...just thinking out loud here?

 

My work is used in civil viz presentations and it would be great to hear how others are handling this issue.

[AJLynn]

Easy enough - get a Macbook and run Keynote

 

(Really - it's better at that kind of stuff. It's part of iWork, which costs $80 and does a ton of crap MS Office doesn't.)

[mare96]

In my presentations I use only a single video which consists of images(drawings,concept,wireframe models,photoreastic models) with impressive transisions and animations of the building or the product.

Plus I use music or comments.For the client is more easy to seat down and enjoy a film like this.

And its not necessary to have special knowledge in video editting.Windows movie maker can do the job!

 

Thats my opinion;)

Tolis

[Claudio Branch]

Easy enough - get a Macbook and run Keynote

 

(Really - it's better at that kind of stuff. It's part of iWork, which costs $80 and does a ton of crap MS Office doesn't.)

 

I am open to using a Mac for presentations. I looked into iWork (Keynote) on the Apple website. With Keynote, "creating smooth animations is simple"...I was unable to find anything about it's ability to embed an existing animation.

[Guest nazcaLine]

Flash.

Nothing more impressive like that.

I learned it a year ago and i keep learning actionscript, it's never enough.but with a basic understanding of flash and AS, you can come up with something really cool.

And, if you don't want something too complicated, there's a slideshow too in flash.

 

Eduardo

[rotten42]

If you don't know flash try Swish. It's kind f like Flash for dummies. There are a lot of free templates out there too. I've used it a couple times for presentation where I've had to incorporate quite a bit of multimedia.

[notamondayfan]

what about good old html website presentation? easy to construct, especially if you use a program like dreamweaver. other than that i recommend flash.

[Claudio Branch]

Easy enough - get a Macbook and run Keynote

 

(Really - it's better at that kind of stuff. It's part of iWork, which costs $80 and does a ton of crap MS Office doesn't.)

 

Today I was able to put your suggestion into action. We acquired a Mac Notebook and the iWork software. I played 8 large animations (500 MB - 1GB) within my presentation without a hitch. Keynote is easy to use and has frame transitions that rival the quality of what I do within Adobe Premiere.

 

Thanks again for the suggestion. It made a significant difference in the quality of our presentation.

[Jeff Mottle]

Today I was able to put your suggestion into action. We acquired a Mac Notebook and the iWork software. I played 8 large animations (500 MB - 1GB) within my presentation without a hitch. Keynote is easy to use and has frame transitions that rival the quality of what I do within Adobe Premiere.

 

Thanks again for the suggestion. It made a significant difference in the quality of our presentation.

 

Yeah I used Keynote for a presentation I recently did with equally large animation files and it worked flawlessly AND looks SOOO much better than PowerPoint.

[mitchrichie]

Keynote is Great. I've also hooked my Video ipod up to a projector to deliver a presentation. Works great for video/audio and stills.

[Claudio Branch]

The use of a Mac Notebook & Keynote for presentations got me to thinking about another interesting question:

 

Do most marketing departments utilize Mac hardware/software?

 

Ours does not, but perhaps they should? I'm not saying that marketing people who don't use Mac's aren't creative problem solvers, just questioning the choice of tool for the specific job of marketing presentations.

 

I am not interested in beating a dead horse (Mac vs. PC) but, it seems that Macs are perhaps better suited for post-production work.