PowerPoint 2010 really makes embedding rich media in your presentations a snap. Not only can you include photos and video in your slides, but you can also edit them directly inside of the PowerPoint 2010 presentation. This avoids having to open an entirely separate program to do simple stuff like cropping or scaling. In this post, we will briefly cover how to insert a video into your presentation and modify it to actually fit the presentation.
Your first step is to get the Office 2010 beta. It’s a free download. Once you’ve got it installed, fire up PowerPoint 2010 and start a new presentation (File -> New). From here, you could go ahead and start inserting whatever objects and media you’d like in your presentation, but it might turn out better if you picked an overall design first. Do this by clicking Design from the action bar across the top. You can activate a design simply by clicking it.
Once you’ve got your basic framework going, you can start inserting the fancy stuff. Just click Insert on your handy-dandy action bar across the top and find the Video button all the way to your right. You can choose a video that you have already created or downloaded on your computer or insert one from a website.
In the later case, where you want to insert a video from a website like YouTube, you will need to go to that site and grab the embed code for that video. Powerpoint will prompt you for the code once you’ve chosen that option. Just use cut and paste.
Now that you have your video in place, you could leave things as is, but what fun would that be? Also, there might be a few tweaks you need to make to the video so that it fits perfectly with your presentation. The first thing you may need to do is trim your video. This will help you keep your presentation focused and concise. Simply right-click your video and choose Trim Video from the menu.
As you can see from the screenshot, you can sometimes end up with a video thumbnail in your presentation that just looks unprofessional. Use the red and green sliders below the video to set the start and end points. The green slider sets your start time, which PowerPoint will also use as your video thumbnail, so you want to make sure you pick a good spot both to start on and to use as a thumbnail.
One other cool thing you can do to really make your presentation pop is to modify the video colors to fit your theme colors. This can make for a more consistent and professional look and keep the video from being too distracting. To do this, click your video and choose Format from the action bar. Once you’ve done that, you should see the Color drop-down on the left side. Hover any of the presets to get a preview or choose More Variations to get into more detail.
In this case, I look like the Incredible Hulk, but at least the video blends in with the design. This only scratches the surface of what PowerPoint and Office 2010 in general can do.
Have you been playing with the beta? What do you think?