Author: Laurence Bogle

In the busy world of work, it can be difficult to get everyone together for an all-hands meeting or for a big announcement.  This may be down to holidays, busy schedules, or other commitments. You can make your company updates slicker, more streamlined, and more flexible for your colleagues by pre-recording them instead of doing them live!

What are the advantages of pre-recording meetings? 

Using XSplit Presenter to record your presentation has many advantages. You can script it in advance and then record it carefully, making sure you don’t stumble over your words. You can check everything in your demonstration goes smoothly, include a voiceover, and make annotations on your presentation as you go along. This will come from rehearsing as well as recording your presentation and watching it back to see what you need to improve.

Using these points can make your presentation more interesting and engaging, and of course smoother and slicker. But don’t forget that it can make it shorter as well – by removing any awkward pauses and speeding up anything obvious or slow. This can remove dead air time, getting all the same information across but in less time. This is something that will definitely be appreciated by your busy colleagues! 

When you pre-record meetings, you can also easily bring in your chosen guest speakers to make a contribution to the presentation. Of course, this can be done live too but pre-recording can make things easier. Now, you can work around your guest’s schedule, making it more likely to secure someone’s time. You can also help your viewers focus on what’s important by adding quick and easy annotations that capture their attention.

Videos can be reused

Once you’ve made your video, it can be watched at a later time by anyone who missed the meeting, without you having to spend time delivering the presentation again. It can also be sent as a file or uploaded to places like YouTube so your audience can watch it back as and when they wish to. Choosing to pre-record allows busy staff to prioritize their workload and to pick an hour that best suits them during the day without compromising their other tasks.

Doing this for your colleagues will prevent them from being taken from their most vital and pressing work to attend a meeting. This allows them to instead structure their day without missing out on the information. It will essentially give your guests greater control over their working day and, in turn, help them to perform at their best.

Having a pre-recorded video allows the meeting attendees to watch the video more than once if they want to. This allows them to make sure they picked up all the information or to show it to a colleague if they wish. This can, again, save you time and increase your reach, whilst still making it more convenient for your audience and their schedule. 

Pre-recording your big company updates can improve the quality of the presentation and make it easier for your colleagues to watch when it’s most convenient for them. We have some handy tips to get you started and some pointers on how to add some sparkle as well!

These days, every presentation has a set of slides. As your perfect pitch deck, it should be well-formatted and engaging, as well as containing pictures and video content. Why not take yours to the next level? Instead of just showing your slides and talking about them, you could take it up a notch and appear in them in a video pitch deck. This will help you stand out from the crowd and might even make putting your presentation together easier.

Make your perfect pitch deck a live video

There are a number of good reasons to create a recording of yourself delivering the presentation. The first one is the wow factor of the perfect pitch deck – by being that little bit different, it’s more likely to pique your audience’s interest. It also allows you to script, practice, and pre-record your lines, meaning that you can edit out any fluffed delivery. This would be perfect if you’re nervous about presenting, allowing you to deliver a much slicker, smoother, and more carefully paced presentation.

Having your presentation pre-recorded in advance takes a lot of pressure off you as a presenter. You now know you can just hit go, and then make yourself available to answer questions at the end. You can amp up audience engagement by speaking to your viewers in the chat while your presentation plays.

What else can you do with a video presentation?

Video pitch decks allow you to plan and implement special effects, such as having your recorded self point to bullets on a slide or pull a graph out of thin air. As you put the video together in XSplit Presenter, you can time transitions to fit your movements and cut out any pauses while you try to find the next graphic or video. This helps make sure that all your media, graphics, and notes appear at exactly the right time in your perfect pitch deck. Now this will require some rehearsal on your part, but getting everything perfect is what we’re after here!

It also gives you the option to include webpages as part of your media, again removing any loading times or worrying about whether a site will work properly when you load it. The platform also pulls in presenter notes from your original presentation, making it easier to remember what to say when you present. To help your viewers focus on the right parts of your presentation at the right time. You can annotate it in real-time using a handy virtual pointer tool. 

How do I make the perfect pitch deck?

XSplit Presenter allows you to take control of your presentations in many ways. At the basic level, you can overlay media, including webcams, NDI guest calls from Zoom or Skype, pictures, and videos over your slides. At its most advanced, you can pre-record your entire presentation and then work through it again. Tidying it up, moving elements around, and producing a more polished and efficient show for your audience when you record it again. Presenter offers the tools to make your presentation stand out, allowing you to concentrate on making the content and writing the script. 

Does your deck require more than one presenter? XSplit Presenter makes it easy to mix things up and add more speakers to your presentation with NDI sources like Zoom or Skype to make it more engaging. 

Presentations can be a challenge no matter what industry you’re in. You can find out more about what XSplit Presenter can do for you here, and we’ve got some additional useful advice for improving your presentations, too.

With online meetings being so easy to organize and add people to, there’s a risk of them being called unnecessarily and wasting time. However, not everything can be conveyed in an email, so meetings are often essential. With that being said, they need to be an effective use of everyone’s time. In this blog, we’ll show you how to have better meetings.

Plan in advance

If you’re organizing an online meeting, it’s useful to know in advance what it’s going to be about, and producing and distributing an agenda listing the topics to be discussed is a good way of making sure everyone is on track. This tells your invitees what to expect and allows them to do research beforehand so they can participate more effectively and give better answers to any questions you have. In some cases, they may even be able to solve the problem in advance, meaning that part of the meeting can be removed. More streamlined meetings are better meetings!

If the meeting involves you sharing information with others, make sure you know not only what you want to pass on, but details around the topic as well so you can be sure to answer any questions. If you’re asking other people to teach you about the topic, have a list of questions you want answers to, and again, good background knowledge of the topic is ideal as well.

Include media in your online meetings

Since you’re likely to know your agenda in advance, you can put together some slides with a summary of the points that need to be discussed. If you’re presenting, these should include pictures to add some visuals to your discussion and to keep your audience engaged by giving them something to look at while you’re talking.

Using slides will help to keep the meeting on topic and reduce the risk of attendees discussing something that only really affects them, while everyone else waits for them to finish. If this does happen, however, politely encourage them to make a note and discuss it after the call, or to call an additional online meeting with only the people the topic is relevant to.

XSplit Presenter is an excellent way to organize the media for your presentation. It allows you to put slides from places like Google and Microsoft Powerpoint, images, videos, websites, and other content together into a single place, making it easy to use during the presentation. You can also use it to manage your webcam, placing you on the screen as a part of your slide content.

Set the schedule

When you send out your meeting invitations, your calendar software will ask for a meeting duration. This isn’t just a formality – it’s important to choose an accurate time slot so that people can schedule their other meetings appropriately around yours. By extension, you also need to make sure that your meeting sticks to its schedule. If you realize partway through the meeting that you are falling behind, you can try to speed up a little bit, perhaps by discouraging discussion or by summarising some of the less important points in your notes.

Getting derailed is a common cause of an online meeting over-running, perhaps due to idle chat between attendees, unrelated discussion, or even too much relevant discussion. Don’t worry – as you get more experience running meetings, you’ll start to get a better feel for how much time to allow, and how much material you can get through in a given time.

The main takeaway from this is that running better meetings shouldn’t be too difficult. They just require some pre-planning and time management. As long as you have an agenda and stick to it, the meeting should run smoothly and on time.

The last couple of years have seen a huge rise in remote meetings and so a lot of us have been trying to learn how to best contribute to them. Fortunately, modern technology has lots of ways to help and can in some ways even beat a traditional meeting – it just needs approaching from a slightly different angle.

Microphone etiquette in remote meetings

Microphones come in many shapes, sizes, costs, and qualities, so it’s important to find the right one for you. First things first – the most important thing is to make sure you can be clearly heard and that you’re not transmitting unwanted noise. Make sure that you’re not picking up any interference from other electronics by making a test recording and playing it back, listening for the hum of static. Sometimes this can be fixed by moving cables around, but sometimes it might just be a bad microphone! Typically, microphones built into webcams are low-quality, but this isn’t always the case (the Logitech C922 has a very solid microphone, for example) and most office laptops are designed with online meetings in mind and so have perfectly acceptable built-in microphones.

If your workspace is noisy, try closing doors or using a headset microphone – if the microphone is closer to your face, it will be less sensitive to background noise. If you still can’t eliminate noise, consider muting your microphone when you’re not talking. This will spare your colleagues from any unexpected interruptions, however, there’s not much you can do about background noise when you’re actually talking. Just don’t forget to unmute.

Make your presentations pop

Give your audience something to look at during your presentation – don’t just leave them looking at your webcam feed, especially as you’ll be concentrating on what you’re saying. XSplit Presenter allows you to easily put together slides, videos, or window sharing, and camera feeds on top of your slides, as well as letting you organize all of these in advance, so you won’t be left scrambling to find that video clip you wanted to share.

By sharing specific windows, you can ensure that you don’t accidentally show sensitive data in a different application or on your desktop, helping with security as well. You can make annotations on your slides in real-time, which means you can highlight the specific areas you’re talking about, or add notes as you go. It’s even possible to bring in video or audio feeds from other presenters, right to your broadcast, putting you both on-screen at once.

Make everyone feel included in remote meetings

With online meetings, it’s important to be aware of the limitations of the technology. There’s a slight delay between you speaking and everyone else hearing it, which means that our instincts around interrupting feel slightly off, so try to be sensitive to when other people start talking. Additionally, you can’t have a side conversation or comment with another person as you could in real life – all conversations have to involve everyone because there’s only one audio channel. This can be especially awkward before or after the main part of the meeting, where people would naturally split off and chat amongst themselves.

It’s also worth trying to make sure your microphone volume is set to a reasonable level; if you’re significantly louder or quieter than everyone else it can feel awkward. You can ask a colleague if your volume level sounds right to them or with XSplit Presenter you can do a quick test recording before you go live to check everything is set up correctly! (It’s also not a terrible idea to practice your presentation beforehand, pre-recording it in XSplit Presenter and watching it back to see where you could improve before the big day!)

Remote meetings don’t have to be a worry – there are many ways to ensure you can still give effective presentations and everyone feels like they are contributing. We’ve touched on using XSplit Presenter and other meeting tips several times before, but there are always new things to try. Let us know what you’re using in the comments below!

Working from home has changed how meetings work and presentations are given. Instead of just having a quick discussion around a table, you may be expected to run a demonstration or slideshow online for your colleagues. This article will run through how to give a presentation and how to make it as slick as possible by following best practices for presentations.

Include media in your presentation to keep interest up

One of the biggest advantages of online presentations is that it’s very easy to add slideshows, videos, and pictures, and be sure that everyone can see them. Make sure that the text on your slides is nice and big – you can’t be sure what resolution your colleagues’ computers are using and this should help discourage you from putting too much text on the slides. Remember, the slide should give you bullet points to work from, rather than being a teleprompter! You should also avoid reading from an off-screen script too – show that you know your topic inside out by talking off the cuff, whilst using your notes to ensure you don’t forget any points.

XSplit Presenter allows you to add slides, videos, and even a feed from your webcam to your presentations and lets you annotate in real-time when you need to highlight parts of your slides for a question. If you’re demonstrating a piece of software, you can also share part of your screen, without risking showing your desktop.

Make sure you’re organized

Few things are worse when giving a presentation than being part-way through an important pitch and realizing there’s a piece of information that you need to access or show that you don’t have ready and available. Trying to stall while you search for that important document can throw off a well-timed presentation, ruining your concentration and flow as a presenter. This is why XSplit Presenter allows you to add all your media as slides, whether that’s pictures, videos, screen shares – it’s all in one place so you can run through without needing to find the next file.

Of course, the software isn’t everything – while it definitely helps, it’s no substitute for running through the presentation first out loud and by yourself. This is something you can record in XSplit Presenter and watch back so you can see where any problems show up and make edits beforehand! This means you can make sure everything is in the right place, you’re not overshooting your time budget and you know what you’re going to say.

How to give a presentation? Keep it fun and engaging!

This advice does depend somewhat on the topic you’re discussing, however, in the modern workplace, a casual and friendly tone is more appropriate than lecturing your audience. It’s absolutely fine to use a light-hearted tone and have some cartoonish art on your slides as long as it doesn’t take away from the information they show.

Making your audience laugh will get their attention and improve their feeling towards you and your presentation, both making them pay more attention to what you’re saying and to be more likely to come to any future presentations you give. Remember to smile – this will subconsciously lighten your tone and make your audience feel more welcome. Try to involve the audience as well instead of just talking to them by including questions or opportunities for feedback, such as raised hands or polls. It’s also important you engage with and respond to the feedback!

Giving a presentation online shouldn’t be frightening – remember your audience is there because they want to hear what you have to say. That said, being well prepared will make for a more comfortable experience for everyone. We’ve given advice on this before, but there’s always more to learn!

These days, with internet connections getting faster and the pandemic having shown us that working from home is not only possible but often desirable, there’s a growing tendency for companies to embrace people varying their place of work between the office and their home — this is known as the hybrid office. It’s a bit of a change of pace from the traditional office, but we’re on hand to help you adjust!

What are the advantages of a hybrid office?

Some tasks are easier from a home office as there are fewer disruptions, whereas others are accomplished more effectively face to face. For a software developer, a brief interruption whilst writing code can set them back half an hour or more, so being able to set messenger software to “do not disturb” and get into the zone for a couple of hours is a wonderful opportunity. Planning work, however, is much more easily done in person where body language and whiteboards are a great aid to discussions.

For employees, being able to eliminate the commute is an enormous time-saver, allowing more time outside work for hobbies and socializing, as well as reducing stress. Flexible work schedules free time for school runs or mowing the lawn at lunchtime, reducing childcare costs, and, again lowering stress. For the company, only having part of the workforce in the office allows for hot-desk setups and reduced office space, slashing overheads.

How to run a hybrid office

Employees need to be able to work with ease in either location without disruption. Laptops are ideal as they can be transported between the two workplaces, ideally, with docking stations (external monitor, mouse, and keyboard) that can connect easily at either end. A VPN is essential to allow employees to use the office network as if they were onsite, and effective communication with colleagues, perhaps using XSplit Presenter for meetings or presentations, helps smooth any difficulties working with people who aren’t in the same location.

This is achieved by letting you include yourself in your slides, easily adding media sources, and having a virtual pointer. All of this allows for a professional and personal presentation during a meeting using the slides you already have in Google Slides or Microsoft Powerpoint. Another added benefit of XSplit Presenter is that it’s easy to use both from home and in the office.

Working conditions are very important – employees must have a suitable office space in their home. A laptop and a sofa definitely won’t work, and even working at a dining table is a temporary solution at best. An appropriate desk chair is a must, as is having sufficient space for screens, keyboard, and mouse, whilst still sitting comfortably. They will be spending a lot of time sat there, so ergonomics need to be taken seriously, or the employee risks injury.

The risks of this kind of office

The hybrid office presents an exciting opportunity for a new way of working, both for employees and employers. There are a few things to be wary of, however:

• Employees may become isolated going for long periods of time without seeing anyone. It’s worth making sure that you offer some online watercooler moments between colleagues, as they won’t be seeing each other as much.
• A hybrid office makes it easier to miss out on the sort of news that gets passed around through workplace chatter — whether this concerns an event in the company or tasks to be done, it’s important everyone’s kept well informed and up to date, perhaps by email or in a Slack or Teams chat.
• Some people struggle to switch between work mode and home, especially if they spend their personal time in the same place as they work. If you’re adapting to a hybrid office model, remember you’ll do yourself some good by getting a change of scenery and not spending all your time in the same chair.
• Children or pets in the household often don’t understand that someone is “at work”, as they’re still in the house. This means setting boundaries is important.

A hybrid office is a flexible and often very fruitful opportunity that’s worth looking into for many businesses. We’ve touched on this before in remote work and working from home and covered the hardware side in home setup upgrades you need, but there’s always more to learn!