This week I am having a lot of visual fun working on exciting slides like this
The LED wall is almost 8K in resolution and the slides are designed to fill the screen with a custom “Ultrawide” presentation. But as the presentation approached 2GBs it was time to pause on design and manage the content for an optimized file size. I trust the NXPowerlite add-in to optimize images in presentations, and the Slidewise add-in to give me insights into what images are oversize, if there are unneeded master slide layouts and much more.
But working with 8K wide slides poses some issues for letting NXPowerlite optimize images. I created a custom 8K resolution profile, so any image LARGER than the profiles 7,680px wide (aka 8K) will be automatically re-rendered to that resolution. But what about a slide like this where the two images; the F1 logo and the awesome F1 vehicle are not 8K images, and need to be optimized to their on-screen size?
The answer, for me, is a feature that is part of PowerPoint – but not well known. Here is the process:
- Copy the image (eg. the race car)
- Use the Thor Hammer add-in to copy the image size and position
- Delete the image (yes delete!)
- Use PowerPoint’s Paste Special > as .PNG (or use the “PNG” icon on my QAT)
- This adds the original image, but at the size it was copied at (eg. an optimized image!). For the F1 car image it originally as a 8.4 MB image (as reported by Slidewise’s image audit). The pasted in optimized .png is 2.8 MB. Same image, at the pixel size needed, so no quality loss, and over 5MB file size reduction!
- Last, use Thor’s Hammer to position the new image exactly where the original image was
Yes, it is a manual process with a number of clicks. And yes, it took me approximately 10 minutes, but I went a 2GB file to a 1.5GB file with no qualify loss!
Back to creating amazing slide layouts!
Troy @ TLC