The PowerPoint Team Blog : Video

Many of the Videos You See on This Blog…

pptteam — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:14:36 GMT

…were created entirely in PowerPoint 2010. Many of you have been wondering how this is possible; it must be some kind of joke. Does PowerPoint make video? Allow me to formally introduce our new “Create a Video” feature. With just a couple clicks, anyone can make a video of his or her presentation which is easy to distribute, share, or archive. Check out this “marketing” video that some of our engineers created and uploaded to YouTube:

Whether for marketing your product, teaching a lecture, or creating a highlight reel from your last vacation, our aim is to take all the things you already do in PowerPoint and re-create them in video. Your video will include everything you already put in your slide shows: text, animations, transitions, narrations and media.

Video is such a dynamic, engaging way to present content, but it’s always been difficult for most people to create video content beyond shooting a clip with a digital camera. I’m excited about this feature because it puts video content at your fingertips instead of forcing you to use complicated video editing software. If you can imagine it in PowerPoint, you can create a video of it. And with a video, you can distribute it to anyone with a computer or DVD player, post it to YouTube, burn it to DVD, put it on SharePoint, or upload it to Facebook. If you’ve downloaded the publicly-available PowerPoint 2010 Beta, you can create a video by going to the File tab, and looking for the Create a Video button under the Share tab.

Thanks for taking a read! Please comment if you have any questions or feedback.

Allen Huang
PowerPoint PM

A Brand New Slide Show...

pptteam — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:48:27 GMT

Over the years, PowerPoint has gone through a number of graphic improvements. Our goal is always to provide the best environment for you to visualize and communicate your ideas. At the beginning of this release, we looked at how advancements in motion graphics have transformed visual storytelling in broadcast TV and movies. We knew we wanted to bring the same capabilities to presentations.

For PowerPoint 2010, we are making the biggest visual update to Slide Show in nearly a decade. PowerPoint's graphics engine is completely rebuilt using DirectX. Everything in slide show (text, shapes, animations, and more) is rendered in full 3D using your machine’s graphics card. Over the next few weeks, we’ll show you how to use PowerPoint 2010’s new tools and effects to improve your presentation.

Here are a few of the features you can expect to see:

· Fully hardware-accelerated rendering engine

· New transition effects and an updated user interface

· Revamped animation effects and a brand new UI (timelines!)

· Animation Painter (copy your animations between objects)

· Choreograph animations with multimedia

As we like to say here at PowerPoint, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a video is worth at least 24,000 per second:

- Jason Zhao and Christopher Maloney

Program Manager, PowerPoint Slide Show

August 25, 2009

Trimming Away

pptteam — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:09:28 GMT

It’s not always effective to show an entire video from start to finish. The interesting parts are usually sandwiched between lots of walking, talking, sleeping, or otherwise unrelated content.

In PowerPoint 2010, you get to choose exactly what to share using the brand new video trimming feature. Simply insert a video, and select the “Trim Video” option on the Playback tab. The Trim Video dialog will appear:

Trimming the video is as simple as dragging the handles at the edges of the timeline, or adjusting the time value in the “Start Time” and “End Time” spinners:

Now you can get straight to the point!

In a future post, we’ll show you how you can use trimming in combination with other new multimedia features so that you can conserve disk space when showing a short clip taken from a long movie.

-PowerPoint Multimedia Team

August 5, 2009

The New PowerPoint Media Experience

pptteam — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:56:00 GMT

One of our pillars for PowerPoint 2010 has been crafting a multimedia experience that allows users to effectively harness the storytelling power of audio and video content. With improvements in bandwidth, computing power, and media devices, we’re seeing media – particularly video – used in all walks of life to enrich communication. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on PowerPoint’s video capabilities over the years, and we’re very excited about the features we’re rolling out in 2010 to make this experience not only dependable, but pleasurable too.

In addition to completely revamping our media playback technology, we’ve improved the whole media workflow: insertion, editing, presenting and distribution. To me, one of our most exciting and ambitious goals was to make video feel like an integrated part of PowerPoint; this means that every effect you can put on a shape or picture now work on video during playback, not just the first frame. Respecting the z-order of video is another example of this deep integration. I think we’ve accomplished this goal, but I’ll let this video speak to some of the simple but amazing things you can do with video in PowerPoint 2010:

We’ve also added some slideshow playback controls to give you full control over the video:

But that’s not all! We’ve also added features to help you trim media, integrate with the animation timeline, and even export your PowerPoint presentation to video. Combining the familiar PowerPoint interface with common video media tasks puts basic video editing within the reach of our every customer, rather than a task that’s only possible today for media specialists with high-end video editing software. I, personally, can’t wait to see what you create.

In the coming months, members of the multimedia team will be diving deeper into specific features on this blog. In the meantime, we’d love to hear any questions or comments you might have. We’ll do our best to address them via future posts or in the comments.

Allen Huang
Program Manager, PowerPoint

How to insert that funny clip you found online

RicB — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:55:00 GMT

Hey everyone, my name is Allen Huang, and I’m one of the Program Managers that works on multimedia in PowerPoint. Although we’re busy working on the next version of PowerPoint, I wanted to take some time to share with you a neat trick I’ve learned in PowerPoint 2007. It also works in older versions of PowerPoint, but I’m going to focus on showing how it works in 2007.

PowerPoint users are often asking how to get their YouTube or MSN SoapBox videos into PowerPoint. It takes a little bit of work to get it in, but now you can have “History of Dance” playing in your presentation too.

There a few setup steps before we get into actually inserting that video:

Make sure you have the Adobe Flash Player installed on your computer

If you’re watching videos on YouTube, you probably already have Adobe Flash Player installed. Otherwise, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ to download it.

Enable the Developer tab

Look for the Developer tab on your ribbon. If it’s not already there, go to the Office menu, where you’ll find a “PowerPoint options” button on the bottom. Select this button to get a dialog box like the one below.

Check the “Show Developer tab in Ribbon” checkbox. After you close this dialog, the Developer tab should appear on your ribbon.

Find the web address for the video you want to put in PowerPoint

The web provides tons of websites that supply user-created, user-uploaded video. YouTube is probably the most popular, but MSN Soapbox, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion are other examples of sites like YouTube. Once you find the video, look for the “Embed code” that allows you to embed a video on a blog or another webpage.

The screenshots below show a couple places where you might find this.

Once you’ve copied this code, paste it in Notepad or any other text editor. I’ve highlighted the two snippets you’ll need below:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

The two places where you’ll find the URL that you need are bolded in the above example. Most of the time you’ll find this URL after “value=” or “embed src=”. Hold onto that URL (http://www.youtube.com/v/dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en&fs=1), because that’s what we’ll need to make this work in PowerPoint. put in PowerPoint to insert the video.

For MSN Soapbox, the parts you’ll need are a little different. Again, the parts you’ll need are highlighted :

<embed src="http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf" width="432" height="364" id="p6vu3jr0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" pluginspage="http://macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="c=v&v=be9075bb-df0a-41c9-8d86-7ded46627e26&ifs=true&fr=msnvideo&mkt=en-US"></embed><noembed><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=be9075bb-df0a-41c9-8d86-7ded46627e26" target="_new" title="Bill Gates' Last Day - CES Clip">Video: Bill Gates' Last Day - CES Clip</a></noembed>

In this case, you’ll need to get the URL after src=”, but you’ll also need the flashvars. All you need to do is add a “?” after the src URL and add the flashvars, like below:

http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf?c=v&v=be9075bb-df0a-41c9-8d86-7ded46627e26&ifs=true&fr=msnvideo&mkt=en-US

What to do once you’re in PowerPoint

Now that all of that’s out of the way, go to the Developer tab and pick the “More controls” dialog (the icon looks like a little hammer/wrench icon).

In this dialog, select “Shockwave Flash Object” and hit OK. Your cursor should be a crosshair now, and you can draw the size for the video. When you let go, there’ll be a box with an X through it. Then select “Properties” from the Developer tab, you’ll get a second dialog that provides lots of options for this Flash object.

Paste the embed code in the blank “Movie” property, and then press Enter. Now when you enter slideshow, the video should appear, and you should be able to interact with it like you would on the website you got it from.

What you’re doing in PowerPoint is inserting an ActiveX control in PowerPoint, which allows you to host other applications in PowerPoint. In the list of “More controls”, you’ll find a Windows Media Player ActiveX control, an Adobe Reader control, and many others that you can manipulate using the “Properties” dialog.

A few additional notes

If you’re presenting with the video, be sure you have an Internet connection, and be prepared for any loading times there might be.
Although you’ll see an EmbedMovie property in the Properties list for the Shockwave Flash Player, it will not actually embed the movie in your presentation. You should ignore that setting.
Due to differences in the file formats, if you’re going to be creating this file in PowerPoint 2007 and then distributing it to someone using an earlier version of PowerPoint, be sure to save as .PPT.

Enjoy Rickrolling your friends in PowerPoint! Reply back and let us know how it works for you!