$99 Websites + Website Design: October 2020

Saturday, October 31, 2020

How To Pull Out of a Downward Spiral

If you think the entire world is going to hell in a hand basket, it's probably mostly inside your own head.

3 Top Cannabis Instagram Video Templates on PlaceIt (DIY Motion Graphics)

In this post we'll help you create cannabis-themed videos with Placeit, where you can make mock-ups, logos, design templates, and animated videos right in your browser. While a template is a great thing, you might want some media that isn’t stock; we’ve added suggestions for extras to help you get the most out these templates.

Placeit is straight-forward to use, but here’s a quick overview: There is no needed experience with Final Cut Pro or the Adobe Creative Suite, everything is done within Placeit. Simply browse the well-organized templates until you find one that speaks to you and you’ll be able to add music, photos and video. Like Tuts+, PlaceIt is owned by Envato.

Currently, users may only use music that Placeit provides—which is a large, high-quality selection—and that might not suit your needs: at the end of this article I’ll suggest a work-around and some great audio tracks from Envato Elements.

Let’s jump in!

3 Top Instagram Story Templates for Cannabis Videos

With legalization of marijuana in more and more places, stigmas associated with the plant have lifted and cannabis habits are shifting, and new opportunities have opened up for entrepreneurs. Here are a few examples of Instagram story video templates for these new ventures:

1. Instagram Story Video Maker for a Cannabis Themed Podcast

Podcasts are a great medium to promote healthy discussion and interesting views that you are passionate about. Try using this template to let your Instagram followers know about your new episode, guest, and the general topics covered in your upcoming publication.

2. Instagram Story Video Template Featuring Animated Cannabis

Try using this template to promote your cooking show! New recipes, the process of making tinctures, alternative uses for hemp, as well the benefits of non-psychoactive CDB are all interesting topics you can cover. This template has a neat animated image to catch the interest of a new follower.

3. Instagram Story Video Maker for a Weed Club

Not every state and province allows delivery of cannabis, but this templates is easily adapted to other things, for example to promote a community-based site that reviews strains, a grower's club, or compassion club would be a really great alternative use.

Extras: More Templates and Marijuana Stock Video Assets

A template that features smoking or a 420 theme might be a little too direct for you. If that’s the case, there are tons of templates that you can choose that can customized with text and media to help you create the video you need.

Instagram Story Video Maker Featuring a Minimalist Design

This template can be molded to be anything you like! Let your ideas be simple and straight-forward. With cannabis becoming more mainstream, some of the imagery used in the past can feel a bit dated, making this minimal template perfect for your needs.

Cannabis at the Sunset Background

A beautiful clip that can be cropped easily to fit your story!

Chill

Chill is a groove-based track that can easily have a voice over added. It's pleasant to the ears and a laid back vibe that suggests wellness.

About That Audio: Using Placeit With Your Own Soundtrack

To add your own audio or a song from outside the Placeit selection, you’ll want to bring the finished video into the iMovie iOS app or an android equivalent (like Filmorago). Here are some great tutorials that clearly explain how to do this. Basically, you bring the project into the mobile app and replace the audio:

IOS Tutorial

Android Tutorial

High-resolution video files are massive and many computers, mine included, can't really handle working with 4K footage, let alone RAW, without overheating, crashing, or just being unable to efficiently make any changes. A proxy is a low-resolution video file that can temporarily take the place of larger-resolution video file in your timeline, allowing you and your computer to easily make an edit that was otherwise impossible.

This update is a game changer for us users who need to work without the office's high powered systems at our disposal, as well as those just managing a high-res project on their own. With this update we can now much more easily move an entire proxy project to anther device, including non-proxy files such as motion graphics, titles and images. With proxies, the whole team can edit the project, then send the work back for the final tweaks (like colour correction and render-heavy effects) to be done on the main computer before the final export.

Surfers sharing a wave — Sharing is caring by Brightphotogallery/Tweny20

How to Create Proxy Media in Final Cut Pro X

Final Cut Pro can now create proxies at 50, 25, and even 12.5% resolutions in both Pro-res and H.264 formants. Another helpful change is that clips without proxies can now be used together with your proxy clips. Until now you weren't able to see your regular clips alongside your proxies.

Here's how to create and use proxy media in Final Cut Pro:

Click Final Cut > Preferences > Import
Under Transcode select Create Optimized Media and Create Proxy Media
Under the View drop drown menu, select Proxy Only to switch your proxy quality. You can toggle back and forth if you'd like to view things in their original resolution, though this will slow things down. I normally use this at start to make sure I'm editing the proxies, then leave it alone.

Settings to create proxy media on import

Under Proxy Media you will be able select your preferred codec as well as your resolution. Optimized Media takes your camera's codec and coverts to Apple's preferred Pro-res. If you are shooting in Pro-res this step isn't needed.

Creating proxy media is pretty much a requirement when working collaboratively. Thankfully it's simple to do!

How to Set Up Computers on a Local Network With Shared Projects in Final Cut Pro X

This is the most basic setup, and the one that most people will start with. It connects two or more computers in the same network location. If you want to connect two computers in the same house, for example, try this.

Configure Media Settings for Sharing

You'll need a storage device, shared on your network. This might be as simple as a DIY RAID device connected to your router, or as robust as a specialized server rack and custom cabling, depending on your needs.

Either way, the first thing you’ll do is create a library on your shared storage device that everyone has access to. Setting up a new library is quick and easy. In Final Cut, use the pathway File > New > Library, shown in the screen shot below.

When you do this you’ll need to change your media settings so that your media files and cache files are available to anyone who is connected.

While setting up your media storage, under Motion Content set your Motion Templates to In Library. When you do this you’re asking the program to reference the storage device rather than your personal computer so that any transitions, title, or effects you’ve created will be available to everyone.

Plug-Ins and Motion Content

You’ll want to make sure that your team has the exact same set of plug-ins, so if you are using third party plug-ins you’ll need to buy enough licenses for the entire team. The same thing goes for those who are designing in-house using Apple Motion; you’ll to set your motion content to In Library to give everyone access.

Look-Up Tables

With LUTs, you’ll need to make them available on your shared storage where everyone can access them, and everyone on the team will need to import them the same way. I’d recommend you do this the same way every time in order to avoid confusion.

Music and Sound Effects

If your project is audio-heavy it isn’t a bad idea to set up your iTunes library on the shared storage, too. After that’s complete, all of the audio will show up in FCPX's music browser.

Managing All the Libraries

As usual, things start to get tricky as you add more people to the job.

When using shared storage, Final Cut locks libraries that are in use to avoid two people working on same library at the same time, which would lead to one person loosing all the work they’ve done.

If you aren’t sure about how your project will come together it is a good idea for everyone to have their own library containing copies of their project files, and to then merge the work and the libraries together when the time comes. Another way to work together is to set up libraries for each reel or act. The most import thing is to have enough libraries so that the workload can be shared with everyone on the team in a safe and reliable way, without losing track of your media and workflow.

Remote Collaboration Tools for FCPX

Sharing video projects can get complicated. Another wrinkle is that your editing by it's nature uses and creates large video files, and all that data is less than ideal for real-time sharing and collaboration.

Before You Subscribe to Hosted Solutions

Just as working with locally shared storage, working remotely also requires everyone on the team to have access to the same files, plug-ins, audio, LUTs and so on. Systems that don't require everyone to sign up to a service are often less expensive and inherently more collaborative, so consider using solutions that you can host or run yourself as much as you can, withing reason and your abilities. If you have a small team and work regularly with the same people, it's worth thinking about creating your own sharing systems, you might be able to save some money.

Subsonic let's your team stream audio and video remotely from one computer to another (on a very affordable $1/month plan), the idea being if people can preview media easily everyone won't need to download every big media file, just the ones they need.
Sparkleshare is a free, cross-platform, open source, self-hosted, secure, file-sharing program. It's great for local sharing of all the related project files like text, office documents, XML files, LUTs, and images and it can be set up with Git hosts like Bitbucket for version-controlled remote sharing.
Off the shelf media servers like Lumaforge’s Jellyfish servers can be a cost-effective alternative to hosted storage, or you can make your own file server with FreeNAS.
ARC-X to help manage backups and archiving.

Postlab

Single-focus, useful service: Instead of creating your libraries on shared storage you create them on Postlab, and then you’ll be able to work with anyone. One of my favourite features is that Postlab handles the locking of libraries that are in use, as well as letting everyone know who and when people are working on each library. With “read only” mode you’ll be able to open up a library in use without disturbing the workflow of the person working away, letting you pull whatever media you may need from that source. Super handy!

Keyflow Pro Server

KeyFlow Pro is a powerful and affordable file management system that can be scaled to your team's size. It has great collaborative features that allow you to search, sort, and annotate your media. KeyFlow Pro and Frame.io (more on this below) work perfectly together, allowing you to preview files directly. Metadata, such as markers and keywords, are uploaded to Frame.io as comments, allowing a seamless experience to between the two platforms.

Frame.io

Frame.io is an amazing cloud-based collaboration platform that keeps you and your team on the same page. It's fast, and has great features, such as allowing you to view media frame-by-frame, side-by-side video comparison, and a strong commenting feature with the ability to draw directly on the clip in question, making communication as clear as it can be.

Wipster

Wipster is a highly integrated collaboration and review software that allows quick and easy threaded commenting of shared media amongst your team. The highlight feature of Wipster is it's partnerships with Adobe, Slack, Dropbox and Wistia, giving you amazing options for working on collaborative projects.

Four right hands all holdings sppons digging brown ice cream from a shared bowl — Hungry friends by Sphotography/Twenty20

Happy Teamworking

I hope you found this tutorial helpful, Make sure to check out more from Tuts+ and Envato Elements to help with all of your photo and video related needs.

Envato Elements is a powerful resource that can help you save time while improving the quality of your final projects. A monthly or annual subscription gains you access to a large library of tools, like courses here on Tuts+, and a giant catalogue of video templates, stock video, and music. All these help keep your workflow moving efficiently and the quality of your work top-notch.

Check out these offerings for all your FCPX needs:

25 Best Free Leadership PowerPoint PPT Presentation Templates to Download 2020

As a business leader, it's pretty certain you're going to have to do a leadership PowerPoint presentation. In fact, you'll probably have to present regularly. Since presenting effectively is a must-have leadership skill, it's important to learn how to make your presentations compelling.

One key aspect of that is the visual design of your slides. Of course, not everyone's a whiz at designing presentation slides from scratch, but luckily, you don't have to be. Using PowerPoint templates for a leadership presentation is a good way to make sure that your presentation is professional.

In this guide, I'll share some of the best leadership PowerPoint templates, paid and free, to help you get—and keep—your audience's attention.

Best PowerPoint Templates for Leadership Presentations on Envato Elements (With Unlimited Use)

If you're looking for leadership PowerPoint presentation templates to help you impress your audience, Envato Elements has a great offer you won't want to miss. Download as many leadership presentation PPT slides as you want, all for one low price.

Here are some of the benefits of using leadership PPT templates for your presentations.

First, a professional design can give your presentations that wow factor that makes your audience sit up and take notice. That's precisely the effect you want to achieve when presenting.

And don't underestimate the impact of the professional design you'll get. It'll help your presentation look coherent. Plus, using professional leadership PowerPoint templates can save you time, which is useful if you've got a lot of presentations to create, or if slide design isn't your favorite task.

So it's a good idea to check out the leadership PowerPoint presentation templates on Envato Elements. Here's how you find them.

find leadership powerpoint templates on Envato Elements — Here are just some of the premium leadership PowerPoint templates on Envato Elements.

Visit Envato Elements and select Presentation Templates next to the search box. Type leadership into the search box. You'll have dozens of leadership PowerPoint templates to choose from. Check out the previews till you find the one you want.

When you've found a template select it, click Download, and start customizing. I'll share some tips on customizing a leadership PowerPoint presentation later in this guide.

Envato Elements is a great choice if you're creating leadership PPT presentations regularly. But if you want leadership presentation PPT slides for one-off use, check out the PowerPoint templates for leadership presentations available from GraphicRiver.

5 Great Leadership PowerPoint Templates from Envato Elements and GraphicRiver

To help you get started, here are some attractive leadership PowerPoint presentation templates from Envato Elements and GraphicRiver:

1. MOUVE - Elegant PowerPoint Template

Mouve leadership powerpoint presentation

Mouve is a minimalist, professional leadership PPT template that'll help you communicate your points clearly and effectively. It includes 50 different slides as well as icons for customization. Plus, it's easy to edit.

2. Speaker Up - Google Slides Template

Sometimes simple PowerPoint templates for leadership presentations work the best. At other times you want variety. SpeakerUp has three color schemes, 12 variations and 360 different slides in total. This professional theme is easy to edit, and can be used in both Google Slides and PowerPoint.

3. Balance - PowerPoint Template

If you're looking for examples of PowerPoint presentations on leadership, Balance is a full-featured starting point. Fully editable, and including icons and mockups, this leadership PowerPoint theme included more than 145 slides.

4. Leadership

This collection of leadership presentation PPT slides will get your presentation off to a great start. It's easy to change fonts, themes, and colors to customize your presentation just the way you like it. All elements are simple to edit via the drag and drop interface.

5. Dinamika – Creative Business PowerPoint Template

examples of powerpoint presentations on leadership

Dinamika is a colorful leadership PPT template set. It includes 36 slides with customizable and resizeable graphics. This is an excellent choice for a creative presentation with lots of images.

25 Top Free Leadership PowerPoint PPT Templates to Download for 2020 Presentations

There's no doubt that premium leadership presentation PPT slides offer an advantage in terms of design and flexibility. Plus they save you time because you don't have to worry about fiddly design details. But before you look for free leadership PowerPoint templates on the web, check out Envato Elements' freebies first. You'll get to try out free PowerPoint presentations on leadership while benefiting from premium design.

Here's how it works:

Every month Envato Elements offers 12 different hand-selected files, (fonts, presentations, videos, and more). Create a free account to download this month's free premium files now.
Or try Envato Market for free. They offer seven handpicked monthly freebies. Log in with your Envato Market account to get this month's handpicked premium freebies.

But if your budget is tight, sometimes free leadership templates for presentations are what you can manage. To help you out, we've found some great leadership PowerPoint templates free to download on the web:

1. Bright Business Presentation

leadership powerpoint templates free download

This is one of many free leadership PowerPoint templates on the Microsoft Office site. It's got a simple and businesslike design.

2. Academic Presentation

This is another free leadership PowerPoint template from Microsoft. Though it's got an academic theme, the elegant design will work well in leadership settings.

3. Green Pitch Deck

If you need to make a pitch, this useful theme is another of the leadership PowerPoint templates free to download from Microsoft Office. It's an attractive way to showcase company information. Change the color scheme if necessary.

4. Training Presentation

This leadership PowerPoint template from Microsoft has a simple design and includes 14 slides. This is a good starting point for a leadership training presentation.

5. Employee Training Presentation

This free leadership PowerPoint theme is suitable if you want to keep your presentation short and sweet. It's got just nine slides, and is set up for delivering training courses.

6. Marshmallow

free powerpoint presentations on leadership

Looking for some inspiration for free? Presentations on leadership using Behance templates are also an option. Marshmallow has a cool color scheme that's sure to appeal to your audience.

7. Business Plan Presentation Template

This leadership PPT template is available in an attractive, muted color scheme. It'll give your presentations a professional look.

8. Corporate Free PowerPoint

SlideSmash also offers templates for free PowerPoint presentations on leadership. This modern design is easy to edit, includes vector graphics, and has 10 slides.

9. Business Consulting

Business Consulting is a free leadership PowerPoint theme from GraphicBulb. It uses a businesslike blue, white and black color scheme to create attractive slides.

10. Business Company

This is one of several leadership PowerPoint templates free to download from GraphicBulb. It includes 16 easy to edit slides, and has an understated color scheme.

11. Investor Pro

When choosing PowerPoint templates for leadership presentation sometimes it can help to match it to your intended use. This theme is intended for investor presentations. It includes 16 relevant slide designs.

12. Free Annual Report PowerPoint Template

If you're looking to create an annual report quickly (we've got annual report tips, too), then check out this free leadership PPT template. It includes 16 attractive slides.

13. ProjectX Free Business PowerPoint Template

Here's another of GraphicBulb's leadership PowerPoint templates that are free to download. ProjectX has a simple, attractive design suitable for many uses. It includes 16 slides.

14. Free Corporate PowerPoint Template

Looking for more free PowerPoint presentations on leadership? FPPT.com has some corporate themes. This one has a muted color scheme and includes slides relating to common business topics.

15. Free Corporate Company Presentation Template

Here's another of the free leadership templates from FPPT. The slide set includes templates for quotes, financials and more.

16. Free Business Presentation Template

This blue-grey presentation template is suitable for a wide range of presentations. It's preset with the basic slides you need and will also work in Google Slides.

17. Free Go-To-Market Strategy PowerPoint Template

For examples of PowerPoint presentations on leadership, check out this go-to-market template. It gives you an outline of what you need for this kind of presentation. It's free from FPPT.com.

18. Start Up Corporation PowerPoint Template

Launching a startup? Then this is a great template to use for a leadership presentation. It's minimalist yet colorful, and will get attention.

19. Business Pitch Deck PowerPoint Template

This pitch deck template has an attractive and unusual design. It's a great example of a PowerPoint presentation on leadership for you to follow.

20. Investor Business PowerPoint Template

This leadership presentation PPT template uses serif fonts to achieve a crisp and formal look. At the same time, the minimalist design keeps it looking modern and attractive.

21. Cute Confetti

If fun is one of your leadership qualities, this PPT download from SlidesCarnival is the way to go. The mixture of confetti and pastel keeps it cheerful.

22. Concentric Blue

This PowerPoint theme has a modern design and blue color scheme. It includes 25 slides, as well as icons and a world map.

23. Medical Illustrated

Here's a different kind of free leadership PPT presentation theme. This one is intended for medical presentations and the slides include relevant illustrations.

24. Bassett

This is a well-designed theme for your next leadership PowerPoint presentation. It includes a variety of slide designs. Edit it using either PowerPoint or Google Slides.

25. York

This is a professional theme, perfect for your next leadership presentation. It includes a range of slide designs. Edit it in either PowerPoint or Google Slides.

How to Quickly Make Great Leadership PowerPoint Presentations

Once you've downloaded your free leadership templates, the next step is to customize them to meet your needs. Here are some tips to get you started. I'll be using the premium Hexagon PowerPoint template.

hexagon leadership qualities ppt download

Let's get started:

1. Edit Your Slide Title and Subtitles

How to Edit Your Slide Title and Subtitles in PowerPoint

I'm going to use the title slide for this. Open the presentation and go to the title slide. Double-click to select the slide title and replace it with your chosen text. Follow the same procedure to edit subtitles.

2. Add Text to Slides

How to Add Text to Slides to leadership powerpoint template

Use a similar procedure to edit body text. Double-click within a text box to select all the text, then replace it by typing your own. You can also paste in pre-prepared text.

3. Add or Resize Images

Click the onscreen image placeholder to import an image from your computer. You can also resize any image by grabbing the handles of the image placeholder and dragging them till you get the size you want.

4. Remove Unwanted Elements

How to Remove Unwanted Elements from a leadership powerpoint presentation

On any slide, click to select an image or text box you want to remove. Then use the Delete key on your keyboard to remove it.

5. Remove Extra Slides

How to Remove Extra Slides from a leadership ppt

At the end of the customization process, there may be a few slides you don't need. Select these in PowerPoint's slide navigator and use the Cut command to remove them.

Discover More Awesome Microsoft PowerPoint Template Designs

We've shared some attractive templates with you, paid and free. To see even more, check out the articles below:

Learn More About Making Great PowerPoint Presentations in 2020

To learn more about creating leadership PowerPoint presentations, read our in-depth PowerPoint tutorial guide, or check out the tutorials below:

Create Your Next Leadership PowerPoint Presentation Today

You've seen some appealing PowerPoint templates for leadership presentations, including some free leadership PowerPoint templates. When making your decision about which templates to use, remember that premium templates offer some advantages over free templates on the web.

Check out the leadership PowerPoint templates available from Envato Elements. You can also try leadership PowerPoint templates on GraphicRiver. It offers dozens of leadership presentation PPT slides for you to try.

Why not create your leadership PowerPoint presentation today? Download your favorite leadership PPT template and get started.