Interactive Media Center / 518 442-3608 Adding Video to PowerPoint 2010 The traditional bulleted PowerPoint presentation can be enhanced using video clips. Such clips can be used to provide examples of a topic or to simple liven up a presentation. Inserting video clips is relatively easy to do, but there are some important points and options that must be considered. In this document we will introduce some basic techniques for placing video in a PowerPoint Presentation. About the Video Clip PowerPoint will accept clips that have been saved in several different video formats. The illustration below is from the Insert Movie dialog box and shows the file formats that PowerPoint can import. Deciding on which video format to use depends on several factors. While MPEG-2 has been the most common format for full-screen video, other formats offer better compression with little or no apparent loss of quality. PowerPoint offers limited video editing capability. The file format will depend, in part, upon which formats the video editing software will export. Most users will want to test their movie clips in PowerPoint before making a final decision. The general rule of thumb is that Window Media Video (WMV) format will usually provide good results and reasonable file sizes. However, unlike older versions of PowerPoint, the most recent versions will import FLA (Flash Video,.MOV (QuickTime), and several other formats. You may wish to experiment to see which looks the best and acts the way you prefer. Another decision that the PowerPoint user will have to make is determining whether the presentation will be shown only on a computer monitor, projected on a screen, or both. Factored into the creation of a movie clip is the resolution of the picture. Early movie clips were created for viewing on monitors that were set with a 640 x 480 pixel screen resolution. These clips were usually 320 x 240 pixels. On older or smaller monitors 1
these movies nearly filled the screen. But on modern large-scale monitors that have resolutions at least 1024 pixels wide those movies are displayed very small. Inserting a Video Clip In this portion of the exercise you will insert a video clip into PowerPoint. You may download a sample clip from /demo_clips/demo-clip.avi. Start PowerPoint. Set up your work space to resemble the illustration on the below. You will need to have a blank PowerPoint slide displayed in your work space. You have two options for the display of your video clip. You can either have it "stand alone" or have a special button that will launch your video player and show the movie. In this exercise you will insert a video both ways. Save your PowerPoint presentation with a name that you will recognize. Copy and save your movie clip into the same folder that contains the presentation. This makes it easier to track what is going on. 2
Click the Insert tab on the Ribbon. The Ribbon will change to display your insert options. Click the Movie button. Select Movie from File. The Insert Movie control panel will be displayed. Navigate to the movie file you want to insert. Highlight the movie file. Click OK. The movie will be imported into the slide. An example is below. 3
Note that there are video controls under the video. You can play the video for testing. The clip will be selected when first inserted. The small round editing handles will allow you to change the viewing size of the clip. But enlarging it too much will cause it to appear fuzzy, if it is a low resolution video, because you are "spreading" the image over a larger area. The example on the right shows the resizing handles in the corners, centers of the sides, and middles of the top and bottom. 4
Press the F5 key on your keyboard to see how the video looks when played during a presentation. PowerPoint has limited video editing capabilities, but those capabilities are usually enough for most projects. Click the video to select it. The blue Video Tools tab will appear at the top of the ribbon. Click the Playback tab on the Ribbon. You now have the full range of editing tools available. The tools are shown below. Here are the tools and what you can do with them: The Play button allows you to play a video. The Add Bookmark and Remove Bookmark tools allow you to set or delete bookmarks which are used to position timing points. Actions, such as animations, can be attached to these timing points. They are sometimes used for controlling playback during a live presentation. 5
The Trim Video tool is used to used to control the length of a video. When the button shown on the right is clicked, the panel displayed below opens. In the Trim Video panel you can set the start point with the green marker or the Start Time selector. You can also set the end point with the red marker or the End Time selector. Playback buttons allow you to test your editing. The Fade In and Fade Out settings are used to set fades for the video. 6
The Volume control button is used to set the sound level to low, medium or high. You can also mute the sound. Selectors for the start of the video are used to control how the video starts, whether or not it plays full screen, and if the video should be hidden when it is not playing. Additional selectors are used to set the video to play continually over and over again, called looping, and whether it should be rewound when stopped. The appearance of the video can be controlled by clicking the Format tab on the Ribbon. The options are shown below. The formatting options include the full set of choices that are most commonly used to customize images, such as photographs. These options include such things as: 7
Adjusting color and Contrast Apply special effects such as postarization Setting special styles that feature borders and drop shadows Controlling border colors Cropping Rotation The image below illustrates the video with several of the options applied. It is particularly interesting to note that even with many customizations the video still plays perfectly. 8