Australian Infront

Slides during events

Posted 10.08.2015 @ 1.54PM

Has anyone here got experience producing slides to be displayed during events? I'm working on some at the moment and Powerpoint isn't going to cut it because I've got to be able to live edit text while it's displayed on screen.

I'd love to talk to someone about what the industry uses/what standards are followed. Can you help me?

Posted 11.08.2015 @ 3.09AM

Don't think there's any "industry standard" outside of Powerpoint, though if you're needing to do real time live edits on screen you're probably going to need to look at something that will connect to a file that can be edited by someone else, so maybe HTML page with Jquery checking for any updates?

Posted 11.08.2015 @ 3.12AM

Actually, you might have to look at it from the point of view of a "webinar" type thing, so take a look at some of those tools.

Posted 11.08.2015 @ 9.36AM

Hard to give an accurate answer without knowing more about the project and how much text needs to be edited. Not sure if keynote does live text editing. You could just use a native app in full screen mode. Then use the page up & down buttons on the keyboard to navigate.

Posted 11.08.2015 @ 12.30PM

Thanks guys!

@Dan, sorry I can't give a lot more information at this stage but I can confirm I'll be typing a single word, one letter at a time. Unfortuantely keynote doesn't allow live text editing in presentation mode. I've also tried a text editor in full screen mode, but unfortunately the formatting tools etc are still visible so it's not appropriate for this situation :(

@Dave that's an interesting idea looking for parallels with webinar tools. I'll look into it.

Posted 11.08.2015 @ 3.03PM

One solution that almost does it......Illustrator > hide artboards. Go full screen. But I couldn't hide the window scroll bars

Posted 12.08.2015 @ 11.58AM

Yes @Dan I agree that's the closest I've come! InDesign is pretty similar. I've found out that there's software AV peeps can use to crop down a screen so I've asked our AV team if they think it could work for this show.

Crazy how something that sounds so simple is apparently so difficult to achieve. On the other hand, I can't imagine every man and his dog is trying to do this!

Posted 13.08.2015 @ 5.45PM

Silly question but do you know the letters/word already?

Posted 17.08.2015 @ 12.14PM

@theunderdog that's actually quite a smart question. The show was on Saturday, so I can give more information now. We ran a science stage show, similar to Spicks and Specks (http://www.wehi.edu.au/news-events/science-square/walter-and-elizas-big-night-out) . One of the challenges was a spelling bee, where contestants were given scientific terminology that they had to spell out loud. So I knew what words they were being given, but I didn't know how they were going to spell until they opened their mouths ;)

My job was to display each letter the contestant said, as they said it. Our video mixer ended up using basic teleprompter software and coding white masks to hide the window edges. It was hacky, but it worked for our purposes! Turns out its even harder to type out someone's spelling than I predicted, but it was a really funny segment and it worked in the end!

Posted 17.08.2015 @ 2.26PM

:: One solution that almost does it......Illustrator > hide artboards. Go full screen. But I couldn't hide the window scroll bars ::

Photoshop can do that in Full Screen Mode.