Computer Science Capstone Design

Best Practices in the making of Video Presentations

Overview

Making effective, high-quality presentations of your project in video format is a valuable professional skill. Live in-person presentations have many very positive advantages (connnection to audience, builds trust/commitment, very personal), but also have many drawbacks, mostly centering around the fact that the entire audience must somehow be there in-person, and the fact that it's intangible, i.e., it happens and is then gone; you can't share it or look at it again later. Not to mention that fact that, in a live presentation, you only get one "take"; if you're making a video, you can present your best performance.

The most unsophisticated way to share a presentation is, of course, just to set up a camera and point it at the speaker during the live presentation. This turns out to be very weak and ineffective: the audio is often incomprehensible unless special wireless mics are used, the resolution is terrible, making the slides and the speakers expressions hard to see, and the speaker may block the video while walking around. Not to mention that the "style" is simply different: a speaker interacting with a live audience works well for that live audience...but doesn't really translate to those watching the video later. Making a video presentation simply requires a completely different approach.

Making an effective video presentation doesn't have to be super hard, nor does it necessarily require expensive hardware/software or hours of video editing. With a little thought and careful planning, you can make a very effective and engaging presentation video. To help out, this page collects a bunch of examples of "best practices" in video presentation...as well as comments by the authoring teams on how they did it. The goal is to allow newbies to video presentation to quickly explore and learn "best practice" techniques to use in making their own video presentations.

IMPORTANT: There is no claim here that all of those examples videos are somehow "perfect in every way". Although all of the examples selected here were generally very good (particularly with respect to video production), the teams that made them surely received constructive criticism on areas that were still weak. The point is that each of them is selected to highlight one or more things these teams did really well...what we call "best practices"...in making video presentations. Of course you could also go look at some TED talks, which are generally extremely polished...but, unlike TED talks, these ideas here are simpler and were implemented by actual Capstone teams with very little expense and equipment.

In short, if you learn from some of the best aspects of the presentations highlighted here, you are likely to come out with a very high quality presentation video. Of course, no presentation can succeed based on nifty technology tricks alone. The most important determinant of quality in any format is still top quality slides and well-practiced verbal presentation that combine into a smooth rhetorical flow that clearly tells the story of the project.

Enjoy!

Some best Practices in Video Presentation of Projects

	Team Reboot, Spring 2020: Final Presentation Best Practices: The best feature of this presentation is how the team cleverly switched in full screen close-ups of the presenters from time to time. They had the videos of the presenters next to full views of the slides for most of it. This was appropriate, since this is where most of the action is. But putting the presenters in full-screen for small spoken transitions makes this much more personal, creates a really nice connection between the speakers and the audience that just can't happen if the speaker is in a small picture-in-picture with the slides. The making of: how they did it.
	Team CartosCosmos: Spring 2020: Final Presentation Best Practices: This is a very clean and well-practiced presentation, with the team doing a good job of explaining complex material. Technically, it shows some good use of interesting transitions between speakers and their segments of the talk. The making of: how they did it.
	Team Digital Roll: Spring 2020: Final Presentation Best Practices: This team demonstrates a nice use of "green screen" technology to essentially place the presenter "into the slides"...or rather "in front of the slides". Doing this keeps the speaker as "part of" the presentation very nicely, and allows you to maximize the slides for good viewability. You do have to specially design the slides so that the speaker's overlap doesn't block something important on the slide! The making of: how they did it.
	Team Intellichirp: Spring 2020: Final Presentation Best Practices: This team used a similar approach to Reboot, with the speaker picture-in-picture next to the slides...only they didn't do the nice "full-screen on speaker" segues. A best practice in this presentation was how they managed to integrate "live motion" content in the talk with excellent visibility in the video. Though the overall slide layout wasn't fantastic, the demo was particularly good and easily-visible in this one, and the use of some animated gifs to illustrate dynamics aspects of a process was useful too. The making of: how they did it.