When it comes to our conference clients, we pride ourselves on providing thorough guidance for their speakers as they craft their presentation visuals. But it’s always easier to communicate tech needs beforehand, than to spend days or even weeks going back and forth with changes and updates, right?
So to help speed up your tech prep for speakers, here’s our ultimate checklist for visual content!
You’ll will want to format your slides as Powerpoint, Keynote, or Prezi presentations. Playing presentations from PDFs or Google slides can be unreliable - and reliability is the name of the game in event production!
The aspect ratio of your slides should be 16:9 - not the standard 4:3 - in order to fill most screens. You’ll want to check your slide format before designing your slides, so that you don’t have to go back and make changes later on.
Try to avoid using black or blank slides if you can. Often times, audiences may not be able to tell if a blank screen is intentional, and it can be distracting.
All images used in your slides should be at least 1080px large in their smallest dimension. This ensures that none of your images appear pixelated on-screen. (If you’re unsure how large an image is, locate the file on your computer, right click on it, and select “Find Information” or its equivalent. You should be able to find the dimensions of the image there.)
A good rule of thumb is, if an image appears pixelated on your screen, it will appear pixelated on ours as well - possibly a little more so. So pay attention to the quality of your images as you’re adding them to your slides.
Videos should ideally be in .mp4 format, thought .mov format is acceptable if necessary. (Our tech team will typically convert it to .mp4 prior to the event, as this filetype often has a smaller size and has a better chance of playing smoothly.)
All videos should have a minimum resolution of 1920x1080px. Anything lower than this will appear pixelated on-screen. 2K and 4K videos are also great!
Just like the slides, videos need to have a 16:9 aspect ratio in order to fill the screen. If your video has a different aspect ratio, there will be black areas around it on the screen.
You can embed video into your slides, but we always ask speakers to provide all videos as separate files as well. Embedded videos can be unreliable at times, so the tech team will keep your videos files cued up separately, to play if the embedded version fails.
We hope this help you and your speakers prepare well for your next event!
Need more specific guidance?