Placing a Movie on a Slide


Your first step is to place the movie on the slide. After that, you can worry about position, size, and playing options. Just as with audio clips, you can place a video clip on a slide using the Clip Organizer, or do so directly by inserting from a file or pasting from another application.

Caution 

Video clips are linked, not embedded, in the presentation. If you move the presentation file to another location, make sure you move the movie clips too. For this reason, inserting videos from the Clip Organizer may not be a good idea; it's linked from the original location and difficult to move. You can get around this by using the Office image from book Publish image from book Package for CD command, which gathers and packages all the needed files.

Inserting a Movie from the Clip Organizer

Just as with sounds and graphics, you can organize movie files with the Clip Organizer. I don't go into it in detail here, because the Clip Organizer is discussed in detail in Chapter 12. Most of the clips that come with the Clip Organizer are animations rather than recorded videos. To select a movie from the Clip Organizer, follow these steps:

  1. Make sure your Internet connection is established (for the best selection of clips).

  2. Display the slide on which you want to place the movie.

  3. On the Insert tab, click the down arrow on the Movie button, and choose Movie from Clip Organizer. The Clip Organizer task pane appears, showing the available movie clips. Thumbnails of each clip appear, showing the first frame of the clip. You can tell that each is an animation or movie rather than a static graphic because of the little star icon in the bottom-right corner of each thumbnail image. See Figure 17.1.

    image from book
    Figure 17.1: Inserting a video clip from the Clip Organizer.

    Note 

    The Clip Organizer shows real movies mixed together with animated GIFs in the search results. Check a clip's properties if you're in doubt as to its type.

  4. (Optional) If you want to preview the clip, open its menu (the down arrow to its right) and choose Preview/Properties. The clip plays in a dialog box; when you're done watching it, click Close.

  5. Click the clip you want to insert. A box may appear asking when you want it to play. (This box won't appear when you insert an animated GIF, because they play automatically.)

  6. Click either Automatically or When Clicked. The clip appears on the slide.

  7. Close the Clip Organizer, and then move the clip as needed. It won't play in Normal view, but you can switch to Slide Show view to test it if desired.

Caution 

Be careful when resizing the video, because it can compromise quality; it's usually better to resize the video in your video-editing software.

To test the movie, enter Slide Show view and click it to play it (if it does not play automatically). You can control when and how the clip plays; you learn to do that later in this chapter.

EXPERT TIP 

Many interesting clips are available through the Clip Organizer if you are connected to the Internet so you can access the Microsoft site. Unlike with artwork, it is not obvious what a clip does just by looking at its name and the first frame (which is what appears as its thumb-nail image). Take some time to insert a lot of clips and try them out to see what you have to choose from.

Remember that you can add your own video clips to the Clip Organizer, as you learned in Chapter 12, and you can categorize them, add keywords, and everything else that you can do to artwork.

Making Clip Organizer Content Available Offline

If you find some video clips in the Clip Organizer that you want to have available later, you can add them to the local collection of clips on your hard disk. That way, if your Internet connection is not available later, you can still access them. To make a clip available offline, do the following:

  1. Make sure your Internet connection is established.

  2. On the Insert tab, click the down arrow on the Movie button and choose Movie from Clip Organizer. The Clip Organizer task pane appears, showing the available movie clips. The clips that are on the Web have a little globe icon in their bottom-left corner.

  3. Open the menu of the clip that you want (the arrow to its right) and choose Make Available Offline. The Copy to Collection dialog box opens as shown in Figure 17.2. If the Make Available Offline command is not present, it means that this clip is already on your local hard disk.

    image from book
    Figure 17.2: Making a clip available offline involves copying it to one of your local clip collections.

  4. Select the collection in which you want to place the clip. (Or click New to create a new collection.) Then click OK.

Inserting a Movie from a File

If the movie that you want is not in the Clip Organizer (and you don't want to bother with placing it there), you can place it directly on the slide, just like any other object. For example, you might have video of your CEO's last speech saved on your hard drive.

Caution 

If you plan on moving the presentation to another location later, place the movie clip in the same folder as the presentation itself before you insert the movie clip into the presentation. That way the path to it stored in the presentation file will be relative, and the link will still work after you move the presentation and movie clip.

To insert a video clip from a file, follow these steps:

  1. Display the slide on which the movie should appear.

  2. On the Insert tab, click Movie. You don't need to open the button's menu because the option that you want, Movie from File, is the default.

  3. In the Insert Movie dialog box, locate the clip you want. Select the clip and click OK.

  4. A box appears asking when you want it to play. Choose Automatically or When Clicked. The movie clip appears on the slide.

  5. Move the clip as desired. Again, be careful when resizing the clip.




Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Bible
Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Bible
ISBN: 0470144939
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 268
Authors: Faithe Wempen

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