By Dave Peiser
I've been searching for an easy, good quality, inexpensive way to convert PowerPoint presentations to video, and I finally found one at AuthorStream.com.
Like many "to-do's", until something becomes urgent,they don't get done, and that was the case with a PowerPoint presentation we had been using for several months with a non-profit I serve on the board for called Class-ACT. We needed to more easlily distribute the presentation, and we really needed it to be posted on our website. So I did a new search and found Authorstream!
The service is totally free if you just want to upload to the the web, and you don't mind leaving it on their website. They will give you a link to the video that you can use in emails, on blogs, etc. Or you can embed it as I have below. If you want to download the video, you pay just $2; or, you can sign up for a subscription if you'll be doing this a lot.
My only complications had to do with an audio track that is part of the presentation. There might be a better way to do this, but I found that I had to convert the audio from mp3 to a wav file, and then as the last thing before saving, embed it in the presentation. Also, I had to save it as a .ppt because the .pptx format deals with audio differently. I don't do this stuff very often, and this worked. Also, the timing of the audio with the slides changed a bit when the final video file was created.
The embedded video is below, or you can see it on the About Class-ACT page.