I’ve organising training sessions at work and have been looking at different ways of recording them. So far there have been two training sessions which I’ve tried different things.

The first was using a video camera, and just recording the presentation.

The second also used a video camera to record the room, however this presenter used a PowerPoint for the basis of the training session. I’ve been thinking of the best way to keep this together. Unlike the first sessions the ‘video’ from the second session wasn’t that valuable but the audio and PowerPoint presentation is.

I wanted a way to combine all of this together and thus I came to a feature I’ve never used before in PowerPoint. The idea is fairly simple but you can save the slides as pictures (File > Save as Pictures).

I’ve also seen the ‘Save as Movie’ option and ‘Save as Web Page’, but in this case .jpg’s of the slides worked out.

I’ve taken the Video of the entire training session as the baseline line. I’ve then dropped the .jpg image over the video feed as required. Some slides go for longer or shorter which I can easily change with Adobe Premiere Pro (or similar software).

This also allows me to take down the .jpg in between slides where there was discussion. Overall I was fairly pleased with the outcome.

I’ve seen other methods of doing this, such as having the PowerPoint slides on half the screen and then the video feed on the other half, but on this occasion this seems like a nice fit.

The next training session is next week, which I’m planning on recording a screen capture (recording the users PC) of the entire session as the sessions will be demonstrations on ‘live’ sites where the content is dynamic and wont be in a PowerPoint slide (flicking through windows, watching the screen change, etc).

I wont be able to show you any of the work I’ve done though due to the training sessions being an internal thing at work, but if you have ideas how the best way to record ‘training sessions’ is or you know of any other useful tips and tricks, even software to make the job easier I would be interested to know.