Emily’s presentation about turtles went down a storm at school. She was asked to re-present in the other two classes. The head teacher has asked if it can be automated and made into a movie that can be embedded into the school website.
The presentation was made in LibreOffice (OpenOffice) Impress on an OpenSUSE Linux box. Automation of transitions between slides and bullet points was as easy as in Microsoft PowerPoint.
Impress allows sounds to be played as each slide is displayed, so Emily has recorded the audio using the open source audio editing application “Audacity”. I have sliced the audio up into chunks to match the slides and set the first couple to play as the first slides reveal. Everything works a treat on pressing F5.
Getting this into a movie format however is proving to be harder than I first thought. I can export the presentation in SWF format, but the automated transitions don’t happen and none of the sounds play either. The viewer is required to click to move from slide to slide and from bullet reveal to bullet reveal 🙁
I have tried QtDesktopRecorder to record Impress presentation as it is displayed on screen including the fancy pants transition animations but audio recorded through the microphone. I think that this is what I’ll have to do, then edit the movie and mix in the audio in the open source KDEnlive application. I’ll let you know how it goes.