Visuals are existing items that you put on the screen.
They include printed materials, photographs, specimens,
etc. When showing visuals, make sure your audience
can see them. Zoom in and show only what is necessary
for the audience to see. In other words, show the
picture, not the person talking about it. Or zoom
in so only the picture shows, not the edges of the
cardboard on which it is mounted.
Mount your visuals on poster board so they are easier
to handle. Take one piece of poster board and cut
it into four pieces. This makes each piece the same
size for ease of handling and helps keep the visual
stable. You can also place all your visuals, one after
another, on a chalk tray or on a music stand and pull
them off one at a time as you need them. This technique
can even be used as a simple transition device by
pulling one card off to reveal the next card.
The most common visual is a picture. To use pictures,
first they must be mounted on a piece of cardboard.
Drawings or graphs out of books or periodicals can
also be prepared this way. Mount these materials so
that they don’t fold over while on camera. Leave
at least 2 inches of cardboard showing on all sides
to ensure that what is behind it doesn’t show
up in the TV picture.
Using the video-editing software program, capture
approximately two seconds of video. Then create a
still image from the best frame of the video. Place
the still frame on the timeline and set the duration.
This method is faster than scanning each photograph,
since video has a better resolution of 72-96 dots
per inch for screen presentations.
Even old photographs, though the image quality may
be poor, can give authenticity to the subject. If
you are going to zoom in and pan across the image
to view details, you may prefer to scan some images
at a higher resolution to avoid pixelization. The
pixel dimensions of a scanned image should be 640
wide by 480 high. If you wish to zoom in on a photo,
you could use the 640-by-480 image and then zoom in
on the image; however, the image quality will suffer.
The best alternative is to scan the image three times
larger than the 640-by-480 standard, and never exceed
a zoom greater than 3x. For the occasional image where
you want to zoom in closer, make a larger scan of
the photo.
