In its second year, Exhibits Fast Forward is a FREE promotional opportunity for SIGGRAPH 2014 Exhibitors: 40 seconds each to promote their booth and entice attendees to visit. Participation is highly encouraged, but it is not mandatory. The Exhibits Fast Forward session will take place 3:45 pm – 5:15 pm on Monday,11 August in Ballroom CD at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
Last year's Exhibits Fast Forward was a big hit, with more than 1,200 attendees and media representatives watching each exhibitor presentation. View last year’s Exhibits Fast Forward for a sample of what others have presented.
To submit your presentation, go to the online submission system and select “Begin a New Submission”, then "Exhibitor Fast Forward").
Please read the information below thoroughly to prepare for the Exhibits Fast Forward session.
Summary
- Fast Forward slides due on Friday, 13 June 2014, 22:00 GMT
- Windows-based PowerPoint 2013 presentations
- Video and audio welcome! (.mp3, .wma and .wmv, no QuickTime .mov)
- Automatic timings for every single slide, adding up to 40 seconds or less
- No need for a title/authors slide
- There is no slide template. The aspect ratio must be 16:9.
- Informative, possibly humorous, always tasteful
You may submit any (reasonable) number of slides. Each must automatically advance to the next slide. Slides may contain embedded animations, audio, and video. However, avoid using too many animations or separate videos playing on the same slide. If possible, put everything into a single video that occupies the whole presentation.
Try to keep the total size of your materials (PowerPoint, audio, and video) to 40 MB or less. We will put together all the presentations into one large presentation, which will be pre-recorded before the show. Please note that there will NOT be any last-minute changes. No exceptions.
General Presentation Guidelines
- We request that at least one presenter appear on stage. There is no limit on the number of people.
- After each presentation, its title will appear for 5 seconds. The title screen will be the cue to walk to the podium if you’re about to present or get off the stage if you just finished presenting. The next presenter may start speaking or wait for the first slide to appear during/after two seconds of blank screen.
- You do NOT need to include a title slide as part of your 40 seconds.
- There will NOT be an option to go back to a previous slide or to make slide last longer, since the entire session is pre-recorded.
- All slide materials must respect copyrights for all content: music, images, and video. We will NOT show copyrighted material without permission during Exhibits Fast Forward.
- Presentations will run alphabetically by name of the exhibitor. To provide the best experience for attendees, keep your presentation informative and easy to understand. Appropriate humor is always a plus. We recommend that you rehearse your presentation to get familiar with the timing.
Technical Guidelines
- The slides should be in Windows-based PowerPoint 2013 PPTX format, and aspect ratio should be standard 16:9.
- You may create your slides using PowerPoint 2013 in any operating system. However, save your slides in Windows PowerPoint 2013 format. We STRONGLY suggest that you create your presentation directly on PowerPoint 2013 and test your presentation on another computer running PowerPoint 2013 on Windows before you submit your files.
- We strongly suggest compiling or at least testing your presentation on a Windows 8 machine to avoid compatibility issues. Windows 8 will be used to compile the presentation.
- If you use audio in your slides, please have it in mp3 format.
- If you submit a video file, it should be in WMV format exclusively; please do NOT use QuickTime (.mov) format. Unfortunately, these will not play in some versions of PowerPoint and are prone to video codec conflicts. Other formats have caused crashes in the past.
- If you are submitting a file with audio and video, please submit an audio-only file to ensure your presentation still has sound (in case there is any corruption to the audio).
- When importing video, please make sure to select the option "Start Playing Automatically" when prompted.
- Do NOT embed video or audio files in the PowerPoint file. They should be linked and must reside in the same directory as the presentation (PPT) file, without an absolute path name. However, image files DO get embedded; you don’t have to put images in your zip file.
- All files (PPT, WMVs, and MP3s, if any) should be included in one ZIP file. This zip file should be uploaded to SIS. If you only have a PowerPoint file with no audio or video, you may upload that single file unzipped.
- Please use only the standard fonts that ship with Windows. If you wish to use any fonts, you should convert the text to an image and then embed the image in place of the text.
- Although you might be able to see your equations properly, they may not appear on another computer. It may prove useful to test your presentation on more than one machine.
- To submit your Exhibits Fast Forward slides, go to the online submission system. Log in to your account > Begin a New Submission > select Exhibits Fast Forward. Complete the required form > click Next > upload your file labeled “Fast Forward”. If you have more than one file (movies, for example), make sure that PPT expects to find them in the same directory as the PPT file, and please zip the files together.
- You will receive an email closer to the conference detailing the check-in process for the Exhibits Fast Forward session. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a slide template for Exhibits Fast Forward?
There is no slide template. This is to emphasize that presenters have complete freedom in designing the slide formatting and animations, and in particular to make full use of the 16:9 space available. The title slides that we will insert between talks will help provide a common "look".
In PowerPoint 2013, it is possible to embed videos directly inside the main pptx file. Can I do this?
Please do not embed videos. Instead, insert these as separate, linked video files. (As you can imagine, concatenating 30-40 talks with embedded videos creates memory issues.) To insert a linked video in PowerPoint 2013, from the “Insert Video” dialog box, click the drop-down menu next to the “Insert” button and select “Link to File”.
May the video file contain surround sound or is it limited to stereo audio?
It’s safest to just use stereo.
My presentation includes only one video file. Can I submit it alone, or should I embed it in a PowerPoint presentation?
Please create a PowerPoint file pointing to the external video file and make sure that it runs from inside PowerPoint. This has helped reveal problems a few times in the past.