From the course: Corporate Video
Converting a slide deck to 16:9
- It's a common problem that often happens these days when working with presenters. You record in 16 by nine because every screen on the planet is now 16 by nine. But presenters are still building presentations using the old four by three aspect ratio. This is particularly true because applications like PowerPoint still refer to four by three as standard as if it was the normal one that you should use. So it's very common that you're gonna need to convert things. Now on an earlier episode, we talked about how to do this with a PowerPoint file using PowerPoint. This week, we're gonna take a look at using Microsoft's PowerPoint file but running it through Apple Keynote. Keynote is Apple's competitor to PowerPoint and has the ability to open both Keynote files and PowerPoint files. And it does some pretty cool things. So if you are on a Mac and you wanna format things using Keynote, I'm gonna show you how. One of the first things you're gonna need to do is get the slide presentation open and then convert its size. To open the presentation, just find your PowerPoint file. In this case, it was shared with me via Dropbox and I'm just gonna drag that on to Keynote. You can also use the file open command. Keynote has the ability to open things up but what you might notice is you get a few warnings depending upon when you opened it. For example here, it tells me that one of the fonts was missing. And that there was an option here on slide four that wasn't fully supported. So you might have to be careful to take a look at different things and compare them to make sure that everything migrates. It's always a good idea to get a PDF of the presentation or to not overwrite the master PowerPoint file, in case you need to go back and check it. I also see that a font was missing so this is a great opportunity to chose Replace fonts and find some of the fonts that might be missing. Now to me, looks like it's not a big deal here, there's just one. And I'm gonna replace that with something simple like an Arial type font. And we seem okay. Looking at everything else here, let's go ahead and substitute this and across the board, it looks like we have a handful of other options here. We'll talk about those more as we encounter them. But I'll just say, replace fonts. Now we can close the area dialogue box here if we want or drag it out of the way, in case we wanna come back to that. And let's maximize this here full screen. What I see is that the shape of the presentation is clearly incorrect. It's a four by three aspect ratio. What I need to do is access the document section to see what's happening. Now in this case, it looks like the master presentation is different than the slides themselves. This is common because many folks don't actually use master slides. Particularly if they're coming from the world of PowerPoint. They just start to design or modify things, never taking the time to set up masters. We'll talk about master slides in a future week's episode, but they are a good idea if you can take the time to do it right. In this case, I'm just gonna modify what's here. And I see that the slide size is currently set to custom. This is just another version of four by three and you see that it's right there. What we wanna do though is choose Widescreen 16 by nine and the slides will be reformatted. To be more specific though, it's a great idea to choose custom slide size. This will allow you to actually enter the correct dimensions in pixels. Now you'll see that Keynote believes that a widescreen slide should be 1920 by 1080. This is good because this is 1080p or high definition. If for some reason, you were working in 4K, you could promote this to 4K. And that would just be a matter of typing in the numbers. Basically double 1920 by 1080 or 3840 by 2160, just multiply these two numbers by two. Other programs might not have the resolution set correctly. So make sure you take the time to specify the resolution here so there's no surprises. Once I click okay, it's going to update those and you'll notice a quick click through on the slides shows things at the correct size. But what I wanna do now is better take advantage of the 16 by nine layout. You see, once you format the slides to be 16 by nine, you'll probably have some more space on the sides. And it's a good idea to fill that space in. Let's go ahead and change things like the overall top title bar here. I'm just gonna select the elements and I'm gonna do a super shift and move these to the left. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Now you can decide to do that on each slide, if you want. It's pretty simple and as you toggle in-between, you can see if there's any shifting that still needs to be compensated for. Make sure that you don't get any jumping from slide to slide. You can also check the position of individual elements by going under format here and look at arrange. And you'll see the X and Y position. If we had master slides, this would be a lot faster and we can just update that on the slide master. You would locate that under the View menu and Edit Master Slides. But in this case, like many folks coming from PowerPoint, there are no master slides. So we need to be extremely careful. Let's exit that view. And if we take a look, that's looking pretty good across the board. Now let's just set the magnification here a bit so we can see things better and I'm gonna take advantage of the space. If I hold down the option key as I drag, you'll notice that it scales in both directions. This makes it very easy if you need to change the overall width of something. If you're using something like a table, however, you might have to be a little bit more careful as you drag and you'll see that that starts to update. But for many elements, you should be able to adjust their size pretty quickly, as needed. There we go. And we're just getting things to better fit the space. Now as you scale, you might notice that some things want to maintain a particular aspect ratio. In this case, pay attention to the individual pieces and you can start to recompose these. Let's just drag that apart there. And I should be able to select the individual elements and adjust their size, but you may notice that depending upon border and other options that you see different things that are unwanted. So you may have to take a look here and remove options like the background color fill so it doesn't extend beyond the border and that gives me a little bit more control over how this information is presented on the screen. In any case, just find a overall mix that's gonna work for you and drag those elements so they seem better positioned. I see there is a little sales chart data here, a little header on that chart. I'm just going to set that to not be there. So I'll turn off the title and it disappears. Everything else is in pretty good shape. Here we have some older historical data. Again, that option drag makes it very easy to scale from the center so that you can preserve things. And I feel at this point, that we have a decent presentation of the information within the 16 by nine space. Now, we have problems with readability and font consistency and we'll tackle that next. But at this point, the slide deck has been cleaned up. So let's choose File, and I'll hold down the option key to choose Save As. This is gonna allow me to rename the file. And I'm just gonna give this a better name such as underscore, 16 by nine, underscore, for video. And I'm now capturing it in the native Keynote file. Once I click save, the file is written and it's now stored in the native Apple format. If you ever need to, though, in the future, you will have the ability to export out a PowerPoint file if you had to give it back to a presenter or a Windows-based colleague. Now that we've got things properly saved in the right file format, and the 16 by nine aspect ratio with the better utilization of space, we're ready to move on to some design issues with things like thickness of lines and font choice to improve the readability when it comes to video.
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