Category: Video and Multimedia

Powerpoint and video

Successfully incorporating video clips into powerpoint isn’t hard, but the process will go more smoothly if you consider how the presentation will be delivered before inserting the video file. This tutorial is mainly oriented toward the PC version of powerpoint, and Windows Media Player, although I may add notes on the Mac version and Quicktime soon.

Let’s go over some possible scenarios:

Scenario 1. You create and present the powerpoint presentation on your own laptop.

If the .ppt file is not going to be moved from its current position on the laptop, you only have to ensure that the video clip actually resides on your laptop, so that it will be available when you are giving the presentation.

So before inserting the video file, make sure that it is indeed on the C drive, or more simply, in whatever folder the powerpoint presentation is in, and not on a networked drive somewhere. This may seem obvious, but I’ve found that many users are not at all clear on what drives they are using.

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Powerpoint Narration Does Not Play Automatically

Sometimes, even if you set a narration or sound file to play automatically when you first add it, it will not play until you click the speaker icon on each slide. When you look at the Custom Animation settings, it may look like it they are set correctly as Start with Previous but there is a second setting which also must be correct for this to function properly.

To fix this setting: click the speaker icon for your sound file. Select Custom Animation. Click on the downward-pointing arrow to the right of the listing for the audio file (“Media_4″ in the screenshot below”).

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2 Caption Templates for MS Producer

If you purchase the MS Producer resource disk available here HERE you will find it contains an example of a Captioned Video template, along with this white paper captioning in Producer (MS Word format)

I found the one captioning template on the CD (captioned video with fixed-size slides) was a good beginning but quickly realized I needed several others. I made two more, which can be downloaded below. To use these templates, unzip them, and put the entire folders into the Producer templates directory on your C drive.
Within Producer, they will show up within the Templates area as:

“Standard Captioned Audio – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K)
and “Standard Captioned Video (320×240) – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K))

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