Optimizing Your Media for the World
Welcome to the 21st century. Computers are omnipresent. The extent of your audience is no longer constrained to a single conference room or the space just over your left shoulder. Whether you are sharing the videos from your recent trip with your family hundreds of miles away or presenting a media-rich business plan to potential customers on the other side of the globe, your slides need to work on computers other than the one right in front of you.
It’s simple, right? Just attach the presentation to an email and click send. If you’ve ever tried this with video in PowerPoint 2007, you’ve probably realized that talk is cheap. In the past, you needed to attach all the video files separately, and you needed to ensure that those files would reach a location on the recipient’s computer that would preserve the links from the presentation.
In PowerPoint 2010, media you insert from your hard-drive is embedded directly into your presentation unless you specifically choose to link. From now on, you only need to worry about a single file - the presentation:
You send the presentation to your friend, and they tell you, "there was an error. Those videos don’t play on my computer." It's very likely that you downloaded a special media decoder at some point, either on purpose or by accident, in order to play that media on your computer. You could ask your friend to install the same decoder, but that's asking a lot (especially if you aren't sure which one is required). This is why we've created the Optimize Media Compatibility feature. Clicking this button in the Backstage will help to ensure that your files playback on other computers:
Now your media is embedded, and you are confident that it will play on any computer. Time to send this in an email. You’ve got a list of recipients, a subject, a message, and you've even remembered to attach the file. You click send. Three minutes later, you receive an email saying that your attachment is too large to send…
Don't worry. Just return to the Backstage and click on the new Compress Media button. This will drastically reduce the size of your media files:
PowerPoint will discard your trimmed regions so that you don't waste space showing a short clip from a long movie. The media are then processed with some very intelligent algorithms which selectively remove data while minimizing the impact to the overall quality of the video and audio.
Your worries about linking, compatibility, and filesize have all been rolled into two simple buttons. All you have to do is click, and we’ll take care of the rest.
There are, of course, other ways to share you brilliant work that don’t involve sending a presentation at all. If you want to learn more, check back soon!
-Christopher Maloney
August 12, 2009
