Freaky People Productions

It a common issue with Powerpoint: you want to play a video inside your presentation. No sweat, simply

'Insert' > 'Movie' > 'Movie from File',

and lo and behold you have a movie playing from within Powerpoint. Well, assuming it’s compatible. But I digress.

My issue has always been the terminology of the command. You’ve selected Insert, and yet nothing has actually been inserted. Instead, a link has been made between that specific slide and the movie file. This is a hard link, and will break if you change the relationship of the PPT file and the MOVIE file.

The reliable workaround for those in the know has always been to place the PPT and the Movie together in the same folder before linking, and always carrying them together as a package.

This hasn’t stopped people from arriving at my Speaker Ready Room with a weenie 300 kB PPT file insisting that the movie is embedded (read: inserted) in their presentation and that it “worked at the office”.

I blame Microsoft for their misleading menus names. However, they have recently redeemed themselves on two fronts:

1. Microsoft Powerpoint 2010 now actually embeds the movie into the PPTX file. This is the default behaviour.
2. A Powerpoint 2010 PPTX file, with an embedded movie, is backwards compatible to Powerpoint 2007.

This is great news, since we will be in transition from 2007 for a while, and it will also encourage more adoption to use the current PPTX format.

I’m still waiting for an opportunity to try out some of the other video features of Powerpoint 2010 (masking, in/out times and other effects), and will report back after some experimentation.

Jan Schultink, the blogger behind Slides that Stick er… Sticky Slides has a very short post showing how Powerpoint can be told to play multimedia that might normally choke it.

It’s mostly pictures, but here’s a written summary for reference:

1. Open the Control Toolbox. It will float over your document.

View -> Toolbars -> Control Toolbox

2. The bottom-right icon (looks like the web designers hammer and sickle motif, with an ellipsis) opens, and you can select ‘Shockwave Flash Object’
3. An empty placeholder box will appear. Right-click and select ‘Properties’



4. A long, vertical properties widow will appear. Key fields to update are:
   • EmbedMovie = True
   • Movie = [the movie name] Keep the flash file in the same directory of the presentation to avoid certain death!
   • Playing = True
5. That’s it! It may be flaky still, so it’s best to use this method when you’ll be the one presenting the deck

You decide to take the plunge and embed a sales video into your Powerpoint presentation. It looks good, and plays well on your own computer at work, but when you get to the conference to test it, you see nothing but a black (or white) square where your video used to be.

Here are a few places to start your troubleshooting if you don’t have the benefit of a technician to help you. Read the rest of this entry »

Need to run a sponsor loop for a reception, but also need a specific slide or two during some brief remarks? You can do both from within the same presentation. No jumping to the desktop!

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If you’ve sat through many Powerpoint presentations recently, you’ll have noticed they are more multimedia than ever before. Embedded movies, youtube links, audio files… they can liven up a presentation, but also require more preparation for both the presenter and the technician.

I strongly recommend to event and conference managers to provide an audio connection for all laptops, and ensure the show computers have been tested with multimedia. Whether you’ve offered it or not, presenters today assume that they can walk in with a flash drive full of video clips, audio files and external web links.

How do you properly prepare for this? Read on for common pitfalls and manageable solutions.

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