This book will show you how to create dynamic and compelling presentations using Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 2002. Producer lets you take Microsoft PowerPoint-based presentations to a more persuasive level by synchronizing your PowerPoint slides with video and audio to create dynamic rich-media presentations. The video and audio you use can be recorded from a video tape or captured live in Producer. You can also import and use existing digital media files.

In addition to using video, audio, and PowerPoint slides, you can also use other digital media files such as still images, HTML pages, or even Web content from a live Web site. You can use the different presentation templates available in Producer or custom templates you create to change the appearance of your presentation.

You can then easily publish your presentation to a variety of locations, depending on how you want to distribute it. Presentations can be published to your own computer, a corporate intranet site, a Web site, a shared network location, or a recordable CD. This flexibility ensures that your message reaches your audience no matter where they are.

Microsoft Producer makes extensive use of Windows Media Technologies. The audio and video in your presentation is in Windows Media Format, a streaming media format that lets you incorporate high-quality audio and video in your presentations. The video and audio are highly compressed because they use Windows Media audio and video codecs to make them smaller, and therefore easier to distribute over the Web, on a corporate intranet site, or over a traditional local area network (LAN). Finally, you can use other Windows Media Technologies to stream your presentations over a corporate LAN, corporate intranet site, or over the Internet so others can watch the presentations you create online.

This book is for people who want to create compelling, rich-media presentations. This book is designed, much like the software, for people who may be new to using digital media. The goal of this book to walk you through the process of creating rich-media presentations, from the basics of recording video and audio to the publishing of the edited project as a presentation, while covering all the tasks you can do in between to create a great final product. The primary audiences for this book are business users and educators.