Lecture Theatre Video Screen as an Autocue

Last week I was called in at short notice to record a video to promote the university internationally. Our award winning filmmaker set this up in a lecture theatre, as it was raining outside. The camera was pointing out the door into the open plan area to provide some atmosphere. So I was looking to the front of the room. We did not have an autocue, so I brought up the script on the large screen at the front of the room. I could see this over the camera operator. If I did not have an electronic copy of the script, I could have used the document camera on the lectern to project from paper. Might be useful for ad-hoc recording.

Education Video with Synthetic Voice Generated from a Powerpoint File

The tool I have been using for creating educational videos is being discontinued, So I have been trying out Narakeet. In its simplest forum, you upload a Powerpoint presentation and it generates a video, with the slides and narration from the notes in synthetic voice. I produced a 13 slide presentation, with 6 minutes of video (11 Mbytes MP4), in about 15 minutes. One problem was getting the right resolution images. Using the page size I had successfully previously produced blurry slides. I had to make the page size much larger to produce 1080P quality video. 

The "Liam" male Australian accented English speaking voice sounds enough like me to be usable. This still sounds slightly mechanical, and not as good as a live recording of my voice. However, that is not an option. I can produce a video with synthetic voice in a few minutes, so I do and I can make corrections very easily so do. Using a human narration would take hours, as would corrections, and so is not feasible.