How to get your Prezi on YouTube

By Holly Kosec on January 7, 2013

By Holly Kosec on January 7, 2013

I recently started toying with a pretty neat presentation tool called Prezi. Prezi allows you to build presentations using either pre-built templates, or by creating custom templates of your own. You can see an example of one of our prezis by checking out our 10 Years of Awesomeness Celebration video.

So, after I created my prezi, I needed to figure out how to get it on YouTube. Prezi doesn’t have any built-in way to get your presentation on YouTube, or even as a stand-alone video file, so we had to improvise.

Step 1: Download your prezi

The first step is to download your prezi. Once you are on the page of your finished prezi, click on Download. This will give you two options:

  • Export to Portable prezi to present offline, and
  • Download for Prezi Desktop to edit and present offline (for Pro users)

The good news is that we don’t need to be a Pro user to do this! Export to a Portable prezi to get to the next step. Once you’ve downloaded the prezi files and unzipped everything, you should have three files like this:

We want to open the one in the middle, with the blue logo. This will open a program that plays your prezi.

2. Open a screen recording program

Now it’s time to open a screen recording program. QuickTime Player is what we use here at T&S, but any other program that can capture a video of your screen will work. To get started with QuickTime Player, go up to File and select New Screen Recording. This will open a new window that will control your screen recording.

Be sure that your screen recording window is not on top of your prezi that you are about to record. It’s also a good idea to make your prezi take up as much of your screen as possible. This will ensure that your video is the best quality possible. Here’s what my screen looks like before I get started.

3. Record our prezi

Now that our windows are in place, it’s time to start recording! Click on the red record button to begin. QuickTime will prompt you to either “Click to record the full screen” or “Drag to record part of the screen”. We want to drag a square around our prezi video, being sure not to include any of the edges or toolbars. Once you’re happy with the selection to record, just click to begin recording.

Once you’ve started recording, you can either set up the prezi to move to the next slide automatically, or you can change the slide manually when you’re ready for it to change.

To set up an automatic timer, click on the button on the right that looks like a play button in front of a timer.

To manually change the slide, simply use the arrow keys on your keyboard. If your computer has a microphone, you can even narrate the slides as you’re recording, and only move to the next slide when you are ready.

Once you’ve recorded the video to your liking, hit stop on the screen recording window, and save your video.

4. Fine-tune your prezi

Now, if you’re at all like me, you may need to trim your screen recording down to get rid of downtime at the beginning or the end of the video. QuickTime has some fairly easy-to-use Edit tools that can help you trim down the recording, or even add multiple recordings together. After you’re done with all of your edits, go to File and Export your new video. It is now in a format ready for YouTube. Awesome!

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15 Comments

  1. Avatar Nick on July 22, 2013 at 10:22 am

    Thanks Holly



  2. Avatar Scott on September 17, 2013 at 3:11 pm

    This is what I needed…THANK YOU



  3. Avatar Robert on September 23, 2013 at 6:44 pm

    This is a huge help. Thanks for taking the time. I was about to by screen-capture software without knowing Quicktime would do the job.



    • Holly Titus Holly Titus on September 24, 2013 at 10:32 am

      Awesome, Robert! I’m glad it was helpful. Quicktime really is a pretty helpful tool, even for minor video editing!



  4. Avatar Marty McCagg on January 12, 2014 at 8:00 pm

    This worked great on the mac – thanks so much you gave great instructions.



    • Holly Titus Holly Titus on January 13, 2014 at 3:09 pm

      Great! I’m glad that you found it helpful.



  5. Avatar ben on March 30, 2014 at 8:00 am

    wondering how you add sound?



    • Holly Titus Holly Titus on April 8, 2014 at 2:26 pm

      You can actually drop in an audio file using QuickTime! It can be a little sketchy at times if you’re trying to adjust the length of either the video or the audio after you drop it in, but it works if you need a quick fix.

      If you’d like more fine-tuned control, I think you’d need to turn to a more advanced audio/video program. AVS Video Editor is one I’ve used in various personal projects, and it’s worked quite well.

      Hope that helps!



  6. Avatar Bessel Pieper on April 5, 2015 at 9:30 am

    Thanks for the advice. I’m going to try it according to all the great and very clear instructions you’ve posted.



  7. Avatar Mike Alderson on July 14, 2015 at 7:37 am

    Hey, very useful thanks. You mention: “If your computer has a microphone, you can even narrate the slides as you’re recording, and only move to the next slide when you are ready.” Does quicktime also record sound with the microphone as it records the contents of the screen, at the same time? Thanks!



    • Tim Priebe Tim Priebe on July 20, 2015 at 4:12 pm

      Yes, it does, Mike.



  8. Avatar Davido on September 16, 2015 at 4:00 pm

    Holly, you’re a gem and this article is priceless! I almost shelled $$ for screen cast software when I had QuickTime Player (for free) all along. I owe you zillion of thanks. 😀



    • Holly Titus Holly Titus on September 16, 2015 at 4:03 pm

      You are quite welcome! Glad you found it helpful. 🙂



  9. Avatar jina on October 24, 2015 at 6:33 pm

    how to i upload my prezi video to youtube