Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2010 Bible

Chapter 17. Incorporating Motion Video

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Placing a video on a slide

• Changing the video's formatting

• Specifying playback options

• Saving a presentation as a video

• Troubleshooting video problems

PowerPoint 2010 has much better support for motion video than any earlier version. It not only supports more video types (including Flash, which was previously difficult to integrate with PowerPoint), but it allows you to trim the clip, bookmark a point in it, and add a wide variety of formatting to it. In this chapter, you'll learn how to insert and configure motion video.

Understanding Video Types

Three cheers for Microsoft for increasing the number of video file types that PowerPoint supports! Presentation developers have long been frustrated by PowerPoint's inability to accept certain file formats, but that problem is largely in the past now. PowerPoint 2010 supports the formats listed in Table 17-1.

Note

What's the difference between a movie and a video? There really isn't any. PowerPoint uses the terms interchangeably.

PowerPoint treats most video types similarly, in terms of how much control you have over their appearance and playback, except for the final two in Table 17-1: Adobe Flash Media and animated GIFs. Both of these deserve a bit of special discussion.

Table 17.1. Supported Video Formats

Format	Most Common Extension	Other Extensions
Windows Streaming Media	.asf	.asx, .wpl, .win. wmx, .wmd, .wmz, .dvr-ms
Windows Video	.avi
Windows Media Video	.wmv	.wvx
MP4	.mp4	.m4v, .mp4v, .3gp, .3gpp, ...