PRESENT TO SUCCEED LESSONS LEARNED

Mastering Live Virtual Presentations with Prezi Video and Spencer Waldron

PRESENT TO SUCCEED LESSONS LEARNED

Mastering Live Virtual Presentations with Prezi Video and Spencer Waldron

Spencer Waldron is the Director of Brand Communications at Prezi, and he was one of the speakers at the 2021 edition of our Present to Succeed conference.

In his session, he showed what you can do with Prezi Video and how you can master the live virtual presentations with Prezi Video’s help. Also how to design and deliver it, as well as share it live.

With the modern reality of nearly daily virtual presentations, Spencer demonstrated several practical techniques to help you build a presentation for any occasion using Prezi Video, without sacrificing the style and with interactivity, which is certain to keep your audience engaged.

So, how do you use Prezi Video better? Below, we share our top takeaways from Spencer’s session.

Virtual presenting

It is getting difficult to keep your audience engaged with screen sharing only the slides. The moment you put the presentation full screen and you do not have any eye contact with your audience is the moment you start to lose them.

Emotional connection comes from eye contact and movement because movement is the gateway to our attention, as Mark Bowden said in another Present to Succeed session. And it is not only about the movement of the speaker, or the facial expressions or hand movements, but also the movement of the content on the screen.

And according to Spencer, this is why Prezi Video was built.

Prezi Video provides you with the ability to bring content on the screen with you live or as a pre-recorded video. And it is not just a Prezi presentation on the screen – you can import your PowerPoint presentation as well and have the slides appear next to you on the screen. You can easily bring images or videos, whatever content you want on the screen.

Moreover, you can interact with the graphics. You can adjust transparency and it allows you to bring your content to life.

A slide from the presentation of Spencer Waldron from Prezi
Spencer is showing us how you can interact with your charts while presenting live.

In Prezi itself, you have the three main products – Prezi Present, Prezi Design, and Prezi Video.

Prezi Design helps you create amazing extra visual content of any type like interactive charts, data, and infographics, or visuals for social media posts.

You also have a content library which is a very useful tool to have because it helps you build your presentations quicker while calling upon anything you might have already used in a presentation.

You also have the brand kit section which could be beyond useful for complying with your company’s brand guidelines.

A slide from the presentation of Spencer Waldron from Prezi

The Brand kit section includes your company’s logo, custom fonts, color palettes, and anything additional to make sure you’re always on-brand.

Spencer suggested using the desktop Prezi Video app because it does not take a lot of bandwidth when you are presenting live. If you present live from the browser, it takes more from the bandwidth you have, which is better to be allocated for your video stream’s quality.

You have three main ways in which you can record a Prezi Video. There is a quick record, which lets you record messages quickly for any situation. Quick record is live editing and it is designed to make it in a few minutes and send it.

The second option is to import from PowerPoint which imports your slides as jpegs that you can place on the screen with you.

The third option is the Prezi Present software that allows you to fully customize your Prezi Video and for which we talk more about a little below.

In the Prezi Video quick record editor, you have an image and an icons library that you can use. You can also effortlessly change the background, the fonts, or the colors used throughout the presentation within the static menu in the upper part of the editor.

A slide from the presentation of Spencer Waldron from Prezi

Here Spencer shows us how easy and quick it is to add text in the quick record Prezi Video editor.

If you decide to make your Prezi Video public, Spencer recommended that you fill out the title, description, and tags, since all material posted on Prezi is indexed by Google, and it’s a fantastic way to utilize it as a marketing tool as well.

Prezi Video

When you choose the Prezi Video itself, it takes you through all the fully customizable design templates to choose from.

Spencer highlighted that Prezi is still the only presentation software that is not linear but is a zoomable 3D canvas. To help imagine and navigate it, Spencer compares it a little to Google Maps and says that you can think about the topics of your presentation as buckets of content, as each topic has its content underneath it.

Static and smart menus are available in the Prezi Video Editor. You may change things on a global level from the static menus, and the smart menus appear for whatever material you’ve selected, such as a picture or a video.

You also have an Insert button from which you can embed a lot of different types of content.

A slide from the presentation of Spencer Waldron from Prezi

The Insert static menu option has more than a dozen options for adding content such as Images, Icons, Animations, Shapes, PDFs, Charts, Watermarks, or Videos.

Spencer suggested that you always utilize the Add to library option on any content you use since you won’t have to worry about it becoming unavailable ever again. You can later always find it in your content library.

A slide from the presentation of Spencer Waldron from Prezi

Spencer shows us where the Add to library button is located.

Let's summarize

Now you have a head start in using Prezi Video. You have the basics of the tool and can go and explore it with more confidence. Prezi Video is invaluable for audience engagement and encourages way more interaction than any other screen-shared presentation.

Let us know in the comments what the best learning from Spencer’s session was for you!

And while reading is great, why not see the whole session by yourself? Get the Tools Track Recordings for the discounted price of €39 or all the 30+ sessions for just €79!

Present to Succeed 2021 Recordings
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Join Present to Succeed - the biggest presentation skills conference in the world

Whether you are part of an organization or running a business, how your slides look will always factor in your success. Learn how to become an influential speaker by joining our 30+ industry-leading speakers’ sessions.

Start engaging your audience better and influencing them to embrace your concepts, hire you, or buy your products. Now is the best moment to get your ticket!

Join Present to Succeed - the biggest presentation skills conference in the world

Whether you are part of an organization or running a business, how your slides look will always factor in your success. Learn how to become an influential speaker by joining our 30+ industry-leading speakers’ sessions.

Start engaging your audience better and influencing them to embrace your concepts, hire you, or buy your products. Now is the best moment to get your ticket!