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Tutorial: How to Composite PowerPoint and Talking Head Video in Telestream Wirecast

Any time you produce a webinar that's got PowerPoint and a talking-head video, it's helpful to present them in the same video frame. This tutorial explains how to composite these two sources in Telestream Wirecast.

You can click and drag the inputs anywhere within the frame and press the Alt (Windows)/Option (Mac) key to resize the frame by dragging (Figure 7, below).

Figure 7. Resizing and positioning the frame.

Take a moment to make sure you’ve got all the content showing. Anything in the checkerboard in Figure 7 (the empty space not filled by the media sources) will be black, so it’s not critical that you absolutely eliminate every square millimeter of the checkerboard pattern.

Next, I do the same thing for the video input that I did for the PowerPoint. So, I choose the B placeholder, then click the Change Source icon (the triangle, circle, and square) in the Attributes panel and select the video I want to use.

In this case, I want to both crop and resize. My source video in this project is a 16:9, 720p video. I select Crop in the Attributes panel, choose the Left, Right, Top, or Bottom slider (depending on which portion I wish to crop), and drag it to the desired location (Figure 8, below).

Figure 8. Cropping the video.

Also, I need to resize it a bit, so I’ll hold the Alt key, drag inward, and there’s my presentation (Figure 9, below).

Figure 9. The visual elements of the presentation are ready to stream.

So again it’s not totally critical that I eliminate all these square boxes, they’ll show up as black. If I had one, I might insert an advertisement in one of the empty areas, and perhaps some branding in another. You’re pretty flexible in terms of what you can include in the video.

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