Multimedia: Music, sound & video

Create an animated intro for videos in PowerPoint

March 4, 2020 by Ellen Finkelstein 3 Comments

If you want to create a series of short training or promotional videos, it’s useful to have an intro that you put in front of each video. This might include your company’s branding or just create a theme that viewers associate with your videos.

Since you’ll be adding a video, it looks better when you animate the intro so that the intro isn’t static. You can easily create animation in PowerPoint that is quite video-like.

This is the animated intro I’ll describe in this post.

After the intro, you’ll add the main message or training, which can be: [Read more…]

4 steps to create a video from PowerPoint slides

July 18, 2016 by Ellen Finkelstein 4 Comments

You can create great videos using PowerPoint! A common reason to create videos is to post them on YouTube but you can post them on a website or on social media as well.

You can make them as simple or as complicated as you want. Here are the basic steps to create a video from PowerPoint slides:

1. Create animated slides (including transitions)

Of course, you start with animated slides. The basic concept is to keep things moving like they would in a video. A video is a very different medium from a slide presentation, so you have to think differently.

For example, after you apply entrance animations, you can apply exit animations so that objects come in and go out. Use some of the more extreme animations that you would never use in a regular business presentation.

2. Add audio (narration and/or music)

[Read more…]

Create an interactive menu in PowerPoint Office Mix

December 1, 2015 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

This post is by Heather Ackmann. She is a new/old PowerPoint MVP. Old, because she’s been an MVP in Microsoft Office for years. New, because Microsoft got rid of Office MVPs, so she’s come over to the light side and is now a PowerPoint MVP. And she’s an MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer). Heather is also full-time author for Pluralsight, creating computer training videos full-time on PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and other topics.

On the job, she is passionate about three things: her audio equipment, her training courses, and her PowerPoint slides. Her desk is never clean, but her courses are meticulously structured. At work and at home she pushes the limits of what her Microsoft Office applications can do and often asks them to do things they weren’t designed to do. When she discovers something new and interesting that Office can do, she loves sharing that information with the world via Twitter, her website, or in one of her many Pluralsight courses. In her spare time, she crochets many hats and scarves for her kids who refuse to wear them outdoors.

* * * * *

If you have not yet had a chance to play with Office Mix, the latest add-in for PowerPoint that allows you to create an interactive online multimedia presentation sharable and viewable on any device, you need to read Ellen’s Introduction to the add-in here.

But if you are already somewhat familiar with Office Mix, maybe have even created one or two Mix presentations yourself, I am going to explain how to take Mix Interactivity to the next level by designing and creating your own custom interactive menu into your Office Mix presentation.

Towards the end of this blog, you’ll find a presentation containing the step-by-step instructions, but here are a few things to consider beforehand.

Why Design a Custom Interactive Menu for Mix?

[Read more…]

Create a screenshot and screen recording in PowerPoint

October 19, 2015 by Ellen Finkelstein 11 Comments

If you create training presentations, especially technical ones, you often need to include screenshots (static images of the screen) and screen recordings (videos showing activity on the screen). In PowerPoint 2010 and later, you can take screenshots from within PowerPoint.

PowerPoint 2016 introduced the ability to take screen recordings and that feature has been added to PowerPoint 2013 as well. If you have all of your updates, you should see it.

The process is a little clunky, so I’ll describe how you can create a screenshot and screen recording in PowerPoint.

Take a screenshot

Choose Insert, Screenshot. A menu drops down showing the available windows. What you need to know is that they include all of your open windows except your current presentation. The clunky part is that if you want to take a screenshot of your current presentation, you have to create a new presentation and do the screenshot from there.
If you want to capture the entire window, just click the window you want.
If you want to select a portion of the window, choose Screen Clipping from the bottom of the window. You can then drag across a portion of an open window. The clunky part here is that the window needs to be visible. You don’t always get a chance to choose a hidden window as you do when you capture an entire window. That’s because you can capture only windows that have not been minimized to the taskbar. However, you can display the window you want before you choose Insert, Screen Clipping, Screen Clipping, and PowerPoint will hide itself and display that window — the window behind it is available for clipping.

The screenshot immediately appears on your current slide.

Of course, you can crop your screenshot. You can also add arrows and text boxes and any other formatting you want.

Take a screen recording

[Read more…]

Side-by-side speaker video and slide content for a live presentation feel

August 10, 2015 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

Start by watching this short video. What do you think?

You can place a video of you speaking on one side of your slide and use the other side for your slide content to come a little closer to a live presentation feel when you need to provide a pre-recorded presentation. Here are some ideas for using such a presentation:

For internal training, on your organization’s Intranet or LMS (Learning Module System)
On YouTube (or another video sharing site) for marketing or for clients
On your website to highlight you as a speaker or present your topic in a more engaging way

I call it a hybrid presentation because it puts speaker video next to typical slide content.

This is very easy to do, especially with a wide-screen slide size. The wide screen gives you more room to put both pieces side-by-side.

How do you play the video across all of the slides?

You can play a video without interruption across slides. (I explain how to play a sound file across slides in my post “Play music or narration throughout a presentation.”)

Play a video without interruption across slides. Share on X

First, insert the presentation on the first slide where you want it by choosing Insert tab, then clicking Movie or Video.

Choose the video file of you speaking to place it on the slide. Keep the video selected.

In PowerPoint 2007, click the Movie Tools Options tab. In the Movie Options group, click the Play Movie drop-down list (it will probably show the Automatically option) and choose Play Across Slides, as you see here.

Strangely enough, this is harder to do in PowerPoint 2010 and 2013. It’s similar to the procedure for playing a sound across files. Here are the steps:

Click the Video Tools Playback tab and set the Start option to Automatically.
Click the Animations tab and then click Animation Pane to open it.
You’ll see 2 items, one that plays the video and a trigger that pauses it, as you see here. Click the Play item, click the drop-down arrow, and choose Effect Options to open the Play Video dialog box.
In the Stop Playing section, click After and enter 999 (the max allowed, just to ensure that it plays throughout the presentation) or the number of slides during which you want the video to play.
Click OK to close the dialog box. The video will now continue to play across your slides.

How do you turn your presentation into a video?

Unfortunately, when I tried to export the presentation as a video, it didn’t work! I saw the video on Slide 1 but it was gone for the rest of the slides. Even on Slide 1, it didn’t play–it was frozen. But the audio worked fine throughout. In the end, I used Techsmith Camtasia’s recorder to record the presentation in Slide Show view and edited out some white space at the beginning and end.

1. Create animated slides (including transitions)

2. Add audio (narration and/or music)

Why Design a Custom Interactive Menu for Mix?

Take a screenshot

Take a screen recording

How do you play the video across all of the slides?

How do you turn your presentation into a video?

Other techniques for side-by-side video and slide content