I've been trying to use PowerPoint more for producing instructional videos. Yes, I'm aware of Camtasia and Premiere, but I'm trying to simplify my workflow and I want to leverage PowerPoint. There's a lot to like about PowerPoint, including its excellent layout and animation tools. But my big gripe is around exporting the video. Generally it does a good job, but it takes a really long time to output (compared to Camtasia) and it produces really large video files (again, compared to Camtasia). A 10-minute 1920x1080 export took almost 30 minutes on a Surface Pro 4 with 8 GB of RAM, and the output file was almost 170 MB!
Specifically on the file size issue, I took my 170 MB PowerPoint output and fed it through Camtasia (yes, I realize any video converter would have worked), and reduced it to 36.8 MB with no noticeable reduction in quality. Looking at the file properties for comparison, I noticed that PowerPoint produces video with really high bitrate (2501kbps) compared to the Camtasia output (541kbps).
I'm aware that PowerPoint provides a quality setting on the export page, but that seems tied to the output size as much as the actual quality. Isn't there some other way to throttle the bitrate in PowerPoint without compromising the output dimensions?
