High-end presentations?

August 29, 2008 12:27 PM

What are people using these days for high-end presentations and convention running?

So I was recently at a trade show for my company (big, international) at a major convention center. During some of the keynotes I was witness to a really good presentation session. I'm curious as to what the "table stakes" are for presentations like this - the stuff clearly didn't look like Powerpoint or Keynote, though I recognize that some of the effects can be done in either, and it was probably so simple as custom photo backgrounds and video for some of the stuff. Do most people use PPT and Keynote to build some of these higher-end presentations? How is the video cued up and delivered at a place like Moscone Center or the Georgia Dome? I'm not looking for techniques here, just tools (and manufacturers where applicable). Thanks.

posted by arimathea to work & money (6 comments total)

When your playing the high-stakes game of presentations, I would assume you transcend into custom apps, or media firms to create your one off "no one else can look like this" presentation.
posted by SirStan at 2:19 PM on August 29, 2008

Wow... I started researching such options.. and found a company (design point power dot com) that charges upwards of $2000 for a powerpoint presentation! I am in the wrong industry.
posted by SirStan at 2:23 PM on August 29, 2008

Having given a presentation at the Moscone Center once, it wasn't anything really special. Laptops running OpenOffice, as it was Sun event. It looks really good because a graphic artist goes over every slides and makes it very, very professional. But in my experience it's just PowerPoint or whatever.
posted by GuyZero at 2:58 PM on August 29, 2008

Is there any example effect which makes you think it couldn't be done in Powerpoint? My guess is it's not so much the tool as it is the well paid graphic designer creating elaborate slides and doing creative things with the built in animation options. I've seen great things be created with MS Paint so my guess is they use an industry standard like ppt and hire someone to make it look exceptional.
posted by genial at 3:58 PM on August 29, 2008

I know some people used to do presentations in Shockwave, especially if they already knew Director. It would make standalone exes that were more foolproof than PPTs and had some fancy charting animation stuff to boot. But since Shockwave seems pretty quiet right now, I don't know what people switched to.
posted by devilsbrigade at 5:09 PM on August 29, 2008

If the convention you were at was for a vendor that rhymes with THISCO, I can tell you exactly what they used, because one of my business partners was responsible for setting up the projection portion of it.

The wall of video was 820 feet long.

14 Christie Roadie projectors were used, blended. (That's where each projector overlaps a bit, and there's either a digital or physical fade on either side.)

All of the content was driven via two Catalyst machines.

As far as presentation (which I don't think there was any in the room I'm talking about), if it was Powerpoint 2007, you'd notice presentations with nice clean text shadows, decent looking text and animations with transparency. Keynote gets used quite a bit, especially in the more creative industries, and you can tell it's Keynote by the great looking typography, and some of the specific slide transitions that get used. Watch one of Steve Jobs' presentation for what I'm talking about.

But if it's really widescreen, whether in Powerpoint or Keynote, the presentations are likely smaller than the actual screen pixels and they are windowed (PIPed) into larger animations or backgrounds with switchers like BARCO's Encore system.

The biggest screen I've ever been projectionist on used three HD projectors, and was about 70 feet wide. That was Powerpoint 2003 in PIPs on either side with Image Magnification (video from cameras) in the middle, all over theme graphics that were pretty static. An Encore was used for the switch on that.

There is some software out there that allows you to cue up HD (and bigger) video files. Two of the most common are PlaybackPro and ProPresenter.

I've seen Flash used for some pieces, but it was really finicky to get working without stuttering on even the fastest machines. The biggest drawback of using Flash or Director is that editing them on site can be difficult. If you're at a show big enough to have screens like what I'm talking about, the techs behind the curtain aren't using the presenters' laptops. To facilitate last minute changes, it's not going to be in a program that requires a programmer edit and export a standalone.
posted by tomierna at 8:21 PM on August 29, 2008