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Introduction

Creating a DVD presentation from PowerPoint is something many PowerPoint users want to do -- and it is also one of the areas that is taken care of third-party add-in providers rather than Microsoft.

In this review, we look at one such PowerPoint add-in product called Wondershare DVD Presenter.

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About DVD Presenter

DVD Presenter is from Wondershare, a company based in China. You can learn more about their products from their site...

DVD Presenter enables you to convert Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to video formats, and burn them on a DVD/miniDVD or save it to DVD/VCD quality video formats (MPEG 2 and MPEG 1). This process retains all the animations, transitions, sound and movies embedded, all in sync with the presentation.

My contact at Wondershare for this review was Mark Brown - thank you, Mark.

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Download and Installation

Download the installer, run the setup routine and follow the instructions. You'll end up with an Wondershare DVD Presenter program group in your Windows Start menu (see Figure 1 below).


Figure 1: Wondershare DVD Presenter

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Using DVD Presenter

Follow these steps to use DVD Presenter:

1. Go to your Windows Start menu and choose All Programs | Wondershare | DVD Presenter | Wondershare DVD Presenter (see Figure 1 above).
   
   
2. This launches the DVD Presenter interface as show in Figure 2,
   
   
   Figure 2: Adding Files
   
   Click on the Browse button which opens a dialog box from where you can select any PowerPoint presentation for conversion, in this window you can even select the output destination folder. Click Next to proceed
   
   
3. The next screen is for Output Properties, as shown in Figure 3. Here you can choose the output file format, video standard and layout, and advanced settings. When done, click the Next button.
   
   
   Figure 3: Output Properties
   
   
4. The third tab of the interface is DVD Menu (see Figure 4). This provides options for customizing the menu style of the DVD and playback options. Make your choices, and click Next to proceed.
   
   
   Figure 4: DVD Menu
   
   
5. The next tab is the Preview tab, as shown in Figure 5. Here you can see a preview of the converted presentation before burning it on a DVD.
   
   
   Figure 5: Preview
   
   
6. Burn Disk is the last and the final tab of the interface (see Figure 6). Here you can choose the burn settings. Once the selections are made, click the Next button to start the burning process.
   
   
   Figure 6: Burn Disk
   
   Note: Make sure that you have a blank DVD inserted in your DVD writer
   
   
7. This will start the burning process as shown in Figure 7.
   
   
   Figure 7: Burning process
   

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Pricing and Support

The download version of DVD Presenter costs $99.95, the CD version is priced at $109.95, for a single user license.

Support options include e-mail response, an online FAQ and tutorials.

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Conclusion

We had no problems with installing and using the program -- but the DVDs created don't seem to work on all computer systems or DVD players. So I'll suggest you first play with a trial version of the product to see if it suits your requirements.

Overall, it's a capable product that reproduces most of the animations and transitions in PowerPoint slides. Often overlooked, this is also a capable PowerPoint to movie converter.

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