Updated: September 4, 2026
When the slides are half the content
A keynote where the speaker gestures at data nobody can read is a video that fails at its job. For technical presentations, product launches and training sessions, the material on screen carries as much information as the person delivering it.
Getting that content into the finished video is a specific production problem with three possible solutions, and the choice has to be made before the event rather than during the edit.
Option one: film the screen
Point a camera at the projection screen or LED wall and record what the audience sees. Simple, needs no cooperation from anyone, and it is the fallback that always works.
It is also the weakest result, for reasons that are physical rather than a matter of skill.
Screens are far brighter than the speaker, so exposing for one ruins the other. Projection screens in a lit ballroom are washed out and low in contrast. LED walls introduce their own problems: the panel refreshes at its own rate, and unless the camera shutter is matched to it, the recording shows scan lines or flicker rolling through the image. Fine text becomes unreadable once it has been through a lens, a sensor and compression, particularly at the back of a large room.
If this is the only option, shoot the screen with a dedicated locked-off camera framed tightly on it, expose for the screen and accept the surroundings going dark, and test the shutter against the panel before the session begins. Slower shutter angles often reduce banding on LED, at the cost of motion blur that matters less on a static slide.
Option two: capture the presentation feed
The better answer is to record the signal that is being sent to the screen, before it reaches the screen. This produces pixel-clean slides at full resolution, perfectly readable, with no flicker and no exposure compromise.
It requires a capture device and cooperation from the AV team, since you are asking to take a split of their video feed. Arrange it in advance. Most AV vendors are entirely willing when asked during planning and considerably less willing when asked ten minutes before doors.
Practical points to settle: where the split comes from, what resolution and frame rate the feed runs at, and whether it carries only the slides or the full programme mix including camera cuts. Record with timecode where you can, so the feed lines up with the camera footage without manual work.
One caution worth raising early. Some feeds carry content protection that prevents recording. This is uncommon in corporate presentation systems and it does happen, so test the capture chain during the walkthrough rather than assuming it will work.
Option three: rebuild in post
Get the original slide deck from the client and cut it into the edit as clean full-frame graphics, timed to match the presentation.
This produces the sharpest possible result and gives the editor complete freedom, and it introduces a different kind of work. Someone has to time each slide against the speaker's delivery, and any animation, video embedded in the deck or live demonstration has to be handled separately.
It works best for structured presentations with static slides. It works poorly for anything where the speaker interacts with what is on screen, or where a live software demonstration is the whole point.
Ask for the deck regardless of which method you use. Even as a reference, it lets an editor confirm what a slide said when the footage is ambiguous, and it is free to request.
Choosing between them
- Slides are dense or technical: capture the feed, or rebuild from the deck
- Live software demonstration: capture the feed, since a rebuild cannot reproduce it
- Mostly images with little text: filming the screen is usually acceptable
- Speaker points at and interacts with the screen: film it as well, so the relationship reads
- Video for internal training: feed capture, because readability is the entire purpose
- Highlight or recap film: screen footage is fine, since slides appear briefly as texture
Most productions end up doing two of these. Capture the feed for readability and also film the screen wide, so the edit can show the room and cut to the clean version when detail matters.
Framing that keeps both readable
The standard corporate composition puts the speaker on one side and the screen on the other, and it usually fails both. The screen is too small to read and the speaker is too small to feel present.
A more reliable approach uses separate coverage. One camera on the speaker, framed properly. One locked wide showing the stage and screen together for context. The clean feed for the slide content. The edit then combines them, often as a picture-in-picture or a split composition built in post where both elements are at usable size.
It has one further advantage worth planning for: the clean slide capture becomes a reusable asset in its own right, which can be cut into training material or shared internally long after the event. Organising that material is covered in building a post-event video asset library.
Live demonstrations and video inside the deck
Two kinds of content break the simple approaches, and both turn up regularly at technology and product events.
A live software demonstration cannot be rebuilt from a deck, because there is no deck. It exists only as the signal being sent to the screen, so a feed capture is the only method that produces a usable record. If the feed cannot be captured, film the screen and accept the compromise, and consider recording the demonstration separately afterwards in a controlled setting where it can be shot properly.
Video embedded inside a presentation is the other case. It plays at the deck's frame rate through the presentation software, and filming it off screen usually produces judder because the playback rate, the screen refresh and the camera shutter are all different. Ask the client for the source video file separately. It is almost always something they already have, and dropping the original into the edit is both quicker and better than any rescue attempt.
The same applies to any animation in the slides. If the timing matters, capture the feed. If it does not, a rebuild from static versions of the slides is simpler.
Sort it out at the walkthrough
Everything above is decided at the venue walkthrough, not on the day. What is the screen: projection or LED, and at what refresh rate? Where does the presentation signal originate and who controls it? Can we take a split, and what connector will it be? Will the client supply the decks in advance? Are there sessions where content cannot be recorded for confidentiality reasons?
That last question comes up more often than people expect at corporate events, where a roadmap slide may be internal only. Better to know in advance than to hand over a video that has to be re-edited. The walkthrough checklist is set out in the pre-event venue walkthrough.
We plan screen capture as part of event coverage rather than treating it as an afterthought, and we test the chain during setup so nothing is discovered at the start of the keynote. There are more articles on conference video on the blog, background on the about page, and if you have an event where the slides matter, get in touch early so we can talk to your AV vendor while there is still time.