If you’ve experienced choppy video or missed slide cues during a town hall, we’ll guide you on how to avoid these issues in the new town hall in Microsoft Teams. Whether you’re a presenter or a co-organizer, we’ll show you how to:
- Set up a two-monitor environment so you can see both your slides and event.
- Upload your video to OBS for flawless playback
- Use third party apps like Internet Clicker that lets you more easily control your slide transitions
- + More!
Video Transcript
Hey, welcome back to our series on getting your event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. We’re almost ready to go live. We’ve set up our event in Teams, we’ve invited our presenters and attendees, and we’ve set up our Q&A widget. Before we go live, you probably have a deck that you want to share out, maybe a couple videos. So in this video, we’re going to take a look at the best practices and a couple gotchas on sharing out decks and videos in Town Hall.
Monitors for Sharing Decks
So Town Hall and Microsoft Teams, as I’m recording this currently, does not support PowerPoint Live. It’s coming, they say it’s coming, so hopefully it is here soon. But as of now, it does not, which means anytime you share out a deck, it’s essentially just a screen share, which means a second monitor is very helpful. So if you’re using a single monitor like this, when you share out your screen, or even a window, you just see this. So to control the deck, you need to go full screen, which means that you can’t then see the other presenters or the chat window. So having a second monitor sort of just dedicated as the screen share, it’s really nice, because then your other monitor can be the chat window and seeing the presenters.
Internet Clicker
If your presenters want to control their own slides and they don’t have a second monitor or anything, I really recommend using something like Internet Clicker. Internet Clicker is a PowerPoint plugin that allows your presenters to control the deck remotely. There’s other products that do similar things, Internet Clicker is just the one I’ve used, but I really like it. It allows you as a producer to be fully in charge of sharing out the deck, which means less hiccups, and it gives presenters the ability to control the deck while also seeing everyone else in the chat.
Sharing Decks in Town Hall vs Teams Live Event
One other thing to know about sharing out a deck with Town Hall that they changed from Teams Live Events: in Teams Live Events, you could have your deck act almost as another presenter in the list of presenters. They got rid of that with Town Hall, so now if you want to share a deck, you have to go up and hit share screen, and then when you want to take it off screen, you stop sharing. So that’s slides. Secondary monitor, really useful to the point of kind of being necessary. Internet Clicker, really really helpful. If you don’t want to use a remote clicker that costs money, I totally get it, I still would recommend having one person sort of drive the slides, it just keeps things a little bit tidier.
Sharing Videos in PowerPoint
Let’s talk about videos. If you have some videos embedded in your deck and you’re sharing it out, they can look like this.
[Music]
“Hey everybody, so sorry I couldn’t be there today, but I just want to say have a great all hands, and I cannot wait to see what we accomplish this year.”
It’s not perfect. The frame rate’s super out of whack. It’s just something that happens with PowerPoint. Really hoping that Town Hall gets that PowerPoint Live soon. PowerPoint Live handles videos really really well, which, you know, will take care of that issue entirely.
Sharing Videos With a Virtual Camera/OBS
For now, a solid workaround is to use a virtual camera. Here we’ll open OBS, which is a free, open-source software. We’re going to upload our video, hit virtual camera, and now in our call we can switch our camera to the NDI feed, and then go back to OBS and hit start. Is this perfect? Not really. But it’s really good, and it is miles ahead of what you’re going to get out of the PowerPoint playback. And if you’re not familiar with OBS and all that looks like a lot, don’t worry. There are hundreds of videos on YouTube about it, there’s thousands of forums, it’s a really vibrant community. It’s a free download, try it out, have some fun with it. Once you get good at it, there’s an entire world that’ll open up to you.
Summary
That’s all for today. Our deck is uploaded, we have our second monitor ready, and we’re going to run Internet Clicker so that some of our presenters can click through on their own. We have our videos uploaded to OBS, I’m going to roll them back as a virtual camera, we’ll make it like a presenter. And next video we go live, and we’re going to get way into the nitty-gritty of what that looks like. Until then, what features would you like to see for sharing out decks and videos? Are you excited about PowerPoint Live? Let us know in the comments. For Worktank, my name is Sean, we’ll see you next time.
Hey, thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more on all things live events, and check out our website at worktankglobal.com for more videos, blog posts, and information on how to take your event to the next level.
Jump to Other Episodes
- Overview of town hall in Microsoft Teams
- Setting up a town hall
- Creating an invitation
- Setting up the Q&A Widget
- Effectively share decks and videos
- Running the show
- Publishing and editing your recording
- Using the RTMP feature