SlideCasts – Sync YouTube Videos with your Google Slides Presentation

Google Slides - YouTube Sync

SlideCasts let you combine YouTube videos and Google Sides / PowerPoint presentations in a single-player. The speaker video and the slides appear side-by-side and, as the video progresses, the slides auto-change in sync with the video.

You can try a live demo of SlideCasts here. Just hit the play button on the YouTube video and you’ll notice that the slides will change at the 10s, 25s and 30s mark (configurable).

SlideCasts can be really useful for educators involved in remote teaching. The teacher’s “talking head” video can be uploaded to YouTube and the lecture slides can be hosted on Google Slides.

If your course slides are available as a PowerPoint presentation that will work as well since you can directly upload your PPT and PPTX files to Google Slides.

How to Sync Presentation Slides with Video

The first step is to install Creator Studio. Next go to slides.google.com and open any existing presentation.

Go to the Addons menu inside Slides, choose Creator Studio and then select Create Slidecasts. Here specify the URL of the YouTube video and your Google Slides deck (both should be public).

Next, specify the timestamps in mm:ss format (minute seconds) when the slides should change in sync with the video.

For instance, if you want the second slide to show at the 15s point in the video, the 3rd slide at the 45s mark and the 4th slide at 1 minute, 20 second mark, your markers would be written as:

0, 15, 45, 1:20

That’s pretty much it. Click the Generate button and copy-paste the HTML code into your website.

The SlideCast player is responsive so the video and slides will auto-resize based on the size of the visitor’s screen.

Download Creator Studio

Embed YouTube SlideCasts

How to Embed Google Slides Like a Pro!

It takes 2 easy steps to embed any Google Slides deck in your website. Open Google Slides, go to the File Menu and choose Publish to web. Your presentation becomes public and you are presented with an IFRAME HTML tag that you can copy-paste in any web page.

<iframe
  src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed"
  frameborder="0"
  width="800"
  height="600"
></iframe>

Google Slides Embedded

Customize your Google Slide Embeds

The embedded Google Slides player can be easily customized by modifying the src attribute of the IFRAME tag.

Auto Start the Embedded Slideshow

Append start=true to the URL and the slideshow will auto-play as soon as someone opens your webpage. Or set start=false and the slideshow will only play when the visitor click the play icon in the slides player.

Change the duration of slides

With start set to true, you can add delayms=1000 to the URL to specify the time (in milliseconds) for which each slide should display before auto-advancing to the next one. For instance, start=true&delayms=6000, the slideshow will autoplay and the slides will auto-advance every 6 seconds (6000 ms).

Play the slideshow in Loop

Add restart=true to the slideshow URL and it will play in a loop, meaning it will auto-advance to the first slide after the last one.

Start from a Specific Slide

Your embedded Google Slides presentation will always start from the first slide in the deck. You can however customize the URL to start the slideshow from a specific slide by adding slide=id.p# to the URL, where # is the slide number.

For instance, if you wish to embed a slideshow with 8 seconds gap and starting from the 4th slide, your URL would be:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed?start=true&delayms=8000&slide=id.p4

Remove the Google Branding and Player Control

The Google Slides player displays the controls and Google branding in the bottom bar. However, if you wish to play the slideshow in kiosk mode without any player controls or Google Branding, just adding rm=minimal to the IFRAME link (rm = Render Mode)

Make the Google Slides player Responsive

The embed code provided by Google Slides has a fixed height and width and will thus display at the same size on both desktops and mobile screens. You can however make the player responsive with a little bit of CSS as detailed below.

  1. Remove the height, width and other parameters from the IFRAME tag:
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed"></iframe>`
  1. Add this CSS to your HTML page. The padding-bottom is set to 56.25% for 16x9 ratio (9/16*100) so the height of the player would be 56.25% of the player’s width. Set the value to 75% for a 4:3 ratio.
<style>
  .responsive-google-slides {
    position: relative;
    padding-bottom: 56.25%; /* 16:9 Ratio */
    height: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
  }
  .responsive-google-slides iframe {
    border: 0;
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100% !important;
    height: 100% !important;
  }
</style>
  1. Wrap the original IFRAME inside the responsive class and you are good to go. Here’s a live demo.
<div class="responsive-google-slides">
  <iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed"></iframe>
</div>

Also see: 🦋 Secret Google Docs URL Tricks

Make Instagram Slideshows with Google Slides

I just discovered an interesting use of the Instagram platform courtesy Addy Osmani – you can publish how-to guides and tutorials on Instagram as photo slideshows. To give you can an example, here’s an Instagram Slideshow that walks you step by step though the creation on Memojis on an iPhone.

People can swipe through your slides inside the mobile app of Instagram or the Instagram website on the desktop. They can like or comment on your post. And you can also embed your Instagram slideshows inside webpages and blogs with few lines of HTML – see one below.

How to Create Instagram Slideshows

A slideshow on Instagram is, in simple English, a gallery of 10 images uploaded in a single post. You can upload slideshows on Instagram from your iPhone or Android app.

You can use apps like Photoshop, Canva to prepare images for the slideshow or if you want something more convenient, try Google Slides. Here’s how:

Go to slides.google.com and create a new Google Slide (you can even upload an existing PowerPoint presentation). Here’s a sample presentation to help you get started.

export slide photos

Inside the presentation, go to File > Page Setup and choose a custom size equal to 1080×1080 pixels for a square presentation. Instagram supports photo sizes with aspect ratio between 1.91:1 and 4:5, so you can choose your canvas size accordingly.

You can insert up to 10 slides in your presentation. Next, go to the Addons menu and launch Creator Studio. Inside the sidebar, choose 1080 for the width and select “Image Sequence” as the export format. Click the “Go” button and it will create a new folder in your Google Drive with all the slides saved as high-resolution PNG image files.

instagram slideshow

Now open the Google Drive app on your iPhone or Android and download all the slide images to the photos folder on your phone. Launch the Instagram App, upload the images in a single post, and you’re done!

Also see: Save Google Slides as a Video File

If you were wondering why we had to go through the Google Drive route, that’s because Instagram API doesn’t allow photo uploads so they have to be uploaded manually.

The post Make Instagram Slideshows with Google Slides appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

How to Download your Google Slides Presentation as a Video File

With Microsoft Powerpoint, you can easily convert your presentation decks into high-resolution video files for uploading to YouTube and other video sites. The exported video files can also include all the voice narrations and background audio that you may have included in the presentation.

Google Slides doesn’t offer an option to save presentations as videos but there’s a new add-on in town – Creator Studio – that brings new export capabilities to your Google Slides. With Creator Studio, you’ll be able to save your decks as animated GIFs, image sequences and HD video (with audio).

Watch the video tutorial for a quick introduction.

To get started, go to creatorstudio.dev and install the Google Slides add-on. It requests certain permissions as it has to read the presentation images for converting them into movies. It also requires access to creating files in your Google Drive since the exported files are automatically uploaded to your Google Drive.

Once the add-on is installed, open any deck inside Google Slides that has at least 2 or more slides. Go to the add-ons menu, choose Creator Studio and it will open up a sidebar.

Specify the width of the output file in pixels. Creator Studio will auto-calculate the height to maintain the original aspect ratio of the presentation. Next, specify the time interval (in seconds) and this is the duration for which each slide would be visible in the video before advancing to the next slide.

google-slides-video-convert.png

Finally, you have a variety of export options to choose from that are not available natively inside Google Slides.

GIF Image

An infinite looping animated GIF image is created that is perfect for sharing inside email messages and blog posts. You can even make stop motion animations by keeping the time interval very low (say 0.2 seconds).

Image Sequence

Creator Studio will capture screenshots of each slide in your presentation and save it as a numbered PNG file in your Google Drive folder. Internally, it uses the Google Slides API to generate these thumbnail images.

MP4 Video

Like the GIF image, Creator Studio will produce an MP4 video file from your deck and you can also vary the time interval between slides.

Video with Audio 

You can upload any audio file in MP3 or WAV format and it will play alongside the presentation. You can upload background music or even voice narration that will play in the background while the video is playing.

google-drive-slides.png

Install Creator Studio

The post How to Download your Google Slides Presentation as a Video File appeared first on Digital Inspiration.