Watching Merlin Mann’s ‘Inbox Zero’ Google TechTalk, it occurs to me that I’ve forgotten to post sage advice here. Speaking as someone who’s video recorded his fair share of conference presentations[1] involving PowerPoint or Keynote slideshows, I have a recommendation for speakers:
Please please please use a light-text-on-dark-background theme for your presentation. It makes camera exposures so much easier, and completely eliminates the pathological case where the slides are burned out and the speaker is still invisibly dark.
There’s a good reason the giant screen at Steve Jobs keynotes is predominantly black; if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to see him on camera. I think this is one of the reasons the director of Mann’s talk sits on the slides so much.
Thank you. That is all. Now I’m going back to finding out how to wrangle my email deluge.
[1] Hnngh? The ‘official’ OpenTech recordings page doesn’t (and as far as I can tell never did) link the videos. Oh, that’s just peachy. Note to self: sort out a proper links page for this stuff.