Include Docs/Images in Video

[mgrove]

I'm going to be shooting an instructional video of a group of teachers engaged in a discussion. The teachers will be referring to 4-5 documents during their discussion and I'd like to be able to project good images of these documents as part of my video so that a large audience can see what the teachers are referring to at key points in the discussion - i.e., have the video image switch to the appropriate document while the teachers discuss it while the audio of the discussion continues and then have the video image switch back to "live" discussion as needed. The docs are currently in Word & Excel but can be converted into other formats. Not sure if and how it's possible to include good images of the docs into the video. Obviously, I could just take close up video shots of the docs and edit that into the video of the group, but I'm not sure the quality would be great and adjusting field of view of the docs would be dicey. Google search for ideas wasn't helpful so my guess is this may not be easily done. Appreciate any help/suggestions.

[MindController]

One solution is you could use a screen recorder like camtasia or bandicam and record video of the word document, highlighting the specific areas that are in the presentation. Then you could just combine the video with your other video.

[Cornucopia]

Take a look at what's shown on television: excerpts. It is quite difficult to get decent resolution of plain text on video, so the pros get around it by just showing little segments each which are zoomed in.

If you don't necessarily want to do that, you could try importing your text into powerpoint, reformatting the layout and order how you like, and then exporting the resulting slides as a picture sequence and inserting them as pip (picture-in-picture) overlay. Mind the point size of the text (should be fairly large, or medium if HD) and best to use sans serif/block fonts.

Scott