How to Play 4:3 PPT on 16:9 Screens without Distortion

As the 16:9 HDTVs and LCD monitors become more and more popular in our life, how to play the 4:3 PPT presentations in full screen mode on these new babies without distortion is a big problem to many people. It seems impossible to make it on the face, but how about if we try to add something to fill the blank part of the screen. Please follow me, I’ll show you step by step.

Assume we have a 16:9 wide screen, and try to imagine a rectangular of which the width is 16 inches and the height is 9 inches. The rectangular comprises two rectangle regions, one is the gray on the left, and the other is the white on the right. The white part represents the original presentation, while the gray part stands for the blank part of the screen. Be sure, if we play a presentation on a HDTV it will not be displayed like this, but two black (or gray) bars (known as letterbox bar) on the left and right sides of the screen. Here, we just concern the layout. What we should do now is to add something to replace the gray part. Before I experienced PPT to flash conversion tools, I have no idea what is appropriate for the little gray.

Articulate Presenter, Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional, FlashPoint and Pointecast Publisher are powerful tools to convert PPT presentations to flash-based ones. Articulate has said they would announce a new version of Presenter that supports PowerPoint 2007 before April, but until now, it’s not available. Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional and Flash Point have released the new version that support PowerPoint 2007, and they do able to convert .pptx files, but only PPT2Flash Pro can do it well (most SmartArts converted by FlashPoint are in terrible condition). Here, take PPT2Flash Professional for example to show how to use this kind of tools to solve our problem.

Firstly, after installed PPT2Flash Professional (the version I installed is 4.1.0 Beta, it’s available for free), open the presentation in PowerPoint, we can find PPT2Flash on the menu bar, click the cascade menu, choose Player Templates, in Player we could see the player’s frame. In the full style mode, there is a panel at the left (there is another template that display the panel on the right) of our slide. It is exactly what we need. With this panel a 4:3 presentation becomes a 16:9 presentation (maybe not exactly 16:9 proportion, but much better).

Then, let’s have a look at what we have on this panel, Company logo; Author Info, which includes E-mail, Bio, Name, Photo; Toolbar, including Flash Title, Attachments, Notes; Control Bar. Users can manually set which items will be displayed. After personalized the player template, publish the presentation, we get a flash presentation with 16:9 aspect ratio.

Now we can play the presentation on 16:9 wide screens by setting its aspect-ratio control to Stretch or Full.

Resource box:
Wondershare PPT2Flash Pro, http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash-pro.php?sid=6
FlashPoint: http://www.flashdemo.net
Articulate Presentater: http://www.articulate.com/product/presenter.php?sid=6PointCast: http://www.pointecast.com/products/index.html