Abstract Accepted: Now What? A Primer on Slide Preparation

if (n == null) The Scientist 13[9]:16, Apr. 26, 1999 Profession Abstract Accepted: Now What? A Primer on Slide Preparation By Allan L. Louderback So, the committee accepted your abstract, and you are going to present your data to your peers at an international, national, or regional meeting. Now what do you do? Panic is the first thought. Now that you have told all your friends about the acceptance and they have congratulated you and patted you on the back, you begin to sober up and realize the pressure you are going to be under. If you are at an academic institution, you will be representing your institution and your department as well as yourself. If you are with an industrial organization, you have to get approvals from your boss and perhaps the president of the company. Your next thought: "What have I gotten myself into?" You want to present and look brilliant doing it. How do you get started? The information offered here will hopefully get you primed for making your presentation look like you spent a million dollars. First of all, read all the instructions that were sent to you by the abstract acceptance committee. Have you been accepted to give an oral presentation or a poster presentation? If you are giving a talk, how long do you have to present and how long for questions and answers afterward? If you are scheduled for a poster session, how much space are you allowed to show your work? You have four possible ways to present: Overhead transparencies 35mm slides Computer slide shows A poster session This article deals with how to make your own 35mm slides. If you are speaking to a large audience, a slide presentation is a good choice. How much this costs depends on how much of your own time you can devote to the project, and how long a lead time you have before the meeting. If you have the time and have access to the proper equipment, the main reasons to prepare your own slides are: Reduced out-of-pocket costs The flexibility of making corrections or updating data at the last minute If you send data to an outside commercial graphics house (a service bureau), the costs for slides can range from $8 to $40 per slide. You hand them the data and they make the slides usually using their standard-format system. Timing makes a big difference. The cost of making slides one to two weeks before you leave for the meeting can range from $8 to $15 per slide. Making them two days before the meeting--the proverbial "rush job"--may cost $20 to $40 per slide. You can make 35mm slides in your own facility using your own computer (PC or Macintosh). Programs that you can use for the PC are Microsoft PowerPoint, Persuasion, Harvard Graphics, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Presentation, or Lotus Freelance Graphics. If you are going to make graphic slides, the most popular programs are in the Adobe series (www.adobe.com). There are many other programs that also will work well, but the ones mentioned here are the most commonly used. Similar programs are also available for the Macintosh. All of the programs allow you to input your data and/or text and then design finished graphic elements as electronic files, which can be printed as 35mm images by a film printer. The use of a shared departmental or institutional film printer for making 35mm slides involves the least cost. There are several film printers that translate electronic data into images, which are then developed just as though they had been shot with a camera. One that I use, and the same model that is used at the departments of pathology at both University of California at Los Angeles and UCLA/Harbor Hospital is available from MIRUS (www.mirus.com). A film printer costs from $7,000 to $12,000, but amortization of this cost is quickly realized with departmental sharing. MIRUS utilizes the Graphx driver called RasterPlus95 (www.graphx.com), which works fantastically with Windows 95/98. A version of RasterPlus is also available for the Mac. You can also send your files on a floppy disk or by modem to a service bureau to have them print and mount your slides. This can be rather expensive and you must give them adequate time to perform their work. If possible, make slides on your own film printer. This gives you maximum flexibility and leads to the lowest cost. Because the slides are so cheap to prepare, you can make them up in different colors and try other changes, depending on your audience. I recommend that you use the new Kodak E100S transparency film. You can develop using the E6 process. This film costs about $10 a roll for 36 transparencies. If you or your department can buy a 100-foot roll of the E100S (called a bulk film roll), the film cost is around 15 cents per slide (about half the cost of the 36-exposure film roll). You have to put the 100-foot roll into a bulk film loader in a darkroom. Thereafter you can load reusable 35mm cassettes in a room with the lights on. You roll just the amount of film you need to make your slides, so there is reduced waste. Eastman Kodak (www.kodak.com) has just released a new updated procedure and chemicals for the E6 development of your own film. The cost of sending film out for development and mounting will be between $7 and $12. The new E6 chemical process is called "Kodak Professional, single use, E6 Process." The difference between this new system and the old one is that you make up the amount to be used in the development process--for example, 350 ml of each of the chemicals for one-time use. You don't reuse the chemicals multiple times as with other kits. This keeps you from being surprised with some bad slides when you are in a hurry. The cost of the development with the new single-use concept is about 10 cents per slide ($3.50 per 36 slides), compared to $7 to $12 per roll when you send them out for processing. Tables I and II summarize exactly how to make the one-time use solutions for the E6 process and the timing for each development solution. What do you need to do your E6 development? Only one item: a deep-water bath capable of holding seven 500 ml bottles that contain the fresh solutions. These bottles are reusable after washing. There are seven steps involved in developing your own slides in a NIKOR (or similar 35mm) tank; total time consumption is about 36 minutes. The solutions are brought to a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit before development begins. In a darkroom, remove the film from the cassette and roll the film (in complete darkness) onto the reel that is placed inside of the NIKOR development container. Then seal it shut with the tank top to protect the film from room light. Follow the directions outlined in Table II for development of the film. When development is completed, discard all of the one-time use solutions and clean the bottles. Hang the film to dry at room temperature. You can hasten drying by turning a small fan on the film. Be sure to hang a clip on the bottom end of the film when drying so that it will hang flat when dry. Then, carefully cut the film and mount in a plastic slide holder and voilá! ... You are finished. In summary, compose your own slides on the computer, print the slides on a film printer, develop the film with an E6 developer, dry the film, and then mount the cut film into a slide holder. The cost to you is your time, the cost of the film, the development, and slide holders. Your out-of-pocket costs should be about 25 cents to 35 cents per slide. Of course, the first time you go through the development process, you might be apprehensive about failing. Carefully follow the directions, and everything will come out just fine. Go to the meeting with slides that look like they cost a million dollars. Everyone will be duly impressed by your professional graphics. Remember when making all slides for a presentation, use the principles of good design. A badly designed slide will be a bad slide, no matter how much money you spend. Here are a few tips: Use dark backgrounds (black, dark blue) with lightly colored text (white, yellow, cyan, light green, light red, light orange). Use only two or three colors on a slide. A rainbow of colors on a slide is confusing. The templates that come with the slidemaking programs are pretty, but using a different one for every slide confuses the audience. Use one template for most slides in your presentation. While there are a hundred fonts in the Windows system, use two at most. Keep to simple fonts such as Helvetica and Times Roman. Using many different fonts is confusing and harder to read. 4. Use the largest size font possible, making the slide legible from the back of the lecture hall. Use only five to six lines of text. To squeeze in a lot of data, you must reduce the font size, making the slide difficult or impossible to read. Avoid 12 rows of data; otherwise the fonts will be too small. About 95 percent of slides are text. Only about 5 percent are devoted to graphics. Although graphic slides are difficult to make without special computer programs such as Adobe Illustrator, they do add to the visual appeal of a presentation. They also can be used to break up a continuous stream of text and make it easier for the audience to absorb the meaning of the presentation. --Allan L. Louderback TABLE I "Kodak Professional, single use, E6 Process" (Small Tank Development) Make 350 ml for single use. (D-water = either distilled or deionized water) Prepare working solutions from package of Kodak concentrates using the formulas below: ml of concentrate ml of d-water Development Step First Developer II 70 ml 280 ml 1 Reversal bath 8.8 ml 341 ml 2 Color Developer - A 50 ml Color Developer - B 16.5 ml 284 ml 3 Prebleach II 24.5 m 325 ml 4 Bleach 108.5 ml 242 ml 5 Fixer 24.5 ml 326 ml 6 Final Rinse 5.5 ml 345 ml 7 All solutions will be heated to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a water bath. TABLE II Small Tank Processing Times: at 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a waterbath Rotate tank every 30 seconds Bottle Time Step Number Bottle Time Step Number First developer II 6.5 min. 1 Bleach 6 min. 5 Wash #1 2 min. Fixer 4 min. 6 Reversal bath 2 min. 2 Wash #2 6 min. Color developer 6 min. 3 Final Rinse 1 min. 7 Pre-Bleach II 2 min. 4 Allan Louderback, Ph.D. (alouder@ix.netcom.com), is president of Clinical Chemistry Consultants, Temple City, Calif., and a faculty member in the department of pathology and clinical medicine, UCLA Medical School.

Abstract Accepted: Now What? A Primer on Slide Preparation

Abstract Accepted: Now What? A Primer on Slide Preparation

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