How to Embed, Format and Edit Videos in MS PowerPoint 2010?

One of the new features added in MS PowerPoint 2010 is the powerful formatting and editing of embedded videos in slide shows. Most of the artistic effects that can be applied to images in Office 2010 can be applied to the embedded videos too. A video can be embedded from your hard drive or from an online video site. Formats that are supported for embedding are Windows media files (asf, wmv), Windows video file (avi), QuickTime movie file, MP4 video, MPEG, MPEG-2 TS and Adobe Flash.

In order to embed video into a slide, click on Video on the Insert ribbon. You can also embed video by clicking on the Insert Media Clip icon in the newly created slide’s text panel (see screenshot below).

For inserting video file from your hard drive, browse and select the file in the ‘Insert Video’ dialog box and click ‘Insert’ to place the video into the slide. By inserting the video, a copy of the video file is placed in the slide, so moving or deleting the original file will not affect your PowerPoint slide.

This may cause the PowerPoint file to be large in size. You can choose to embed a link to the video file in the slide by selecting ‘Link to File’ in the Insert Video dialog box. You can also embed video files from online sites. Choose ‘Video from Online Video Site..’ from the Video menu in the Insert ribbon (see below screenshot to the left).

For embedding online video, you have to copy and paste the embed code into the ‘Insert Video From Online Video Site’ dialog box and click ‘Insert’. You can insert videos from YouTube, Veoh, etc.

Apart from giving easy ways to embed video into slides, PowerPoint 2010 gives integrated powerful video editing and formatting capabilities, thus not requiring any external software. Right clicking on the embedded video gives many formatting and editing options. You can preview the video by clicking on ‘Preview’. The mini toolbar for sizing and positioning the video (seen above the right click context menu in the screenshot below) gives easy one click access to many settings like length, width of the video frame, adding subtitle text, bringing the video forward or backward, cropping and rotation.

You can chop the embedded video with desired start and end times. Right click on the video and choose ‘Trim Video…’ to cut the video by dragging the sliders in the timebar of the video or by manually entering the start and end times. The video will play for the set duration and from the set start time when you give the presentation.

‘Set Poster Frame’ is another handy feature using which you can set a chosen frame from the embedded video or any image from your hard disk as the poster frame for the video. A poster frame is the picture shown when the video is not playing. To set the poster frame, pause the video at the desired frame and select ‘Use Current Frame’ from ‘Set Poster Frame’ drop down list.
    
Other Video Formatting features are Preview of video with the formatting before saving them, adding a bookmark to desired points in the video, setting fade options like duration and timein/timeout, Start on Click, Full Screen mode, Hide While Not Playing, Loop Until Stopped, Rewind after Playing, Show Media Controls etc. These Powerful Video editing and formatting tools can be accessed from the “Video Tools” ribbon as shown in the images below.

PowerPoint 2010 gives very powerful enhancing capabilities to embedded video, similar to the image editing features. Apart from the flexibility to set a Poster frame for the video, you can edit the border, shape of the video, create effects like Shadow, Reflection, Glow, Soft Edges, Beveling, 3D Rotation etc. You can choose any of the more than 25 available preset video styles.

A screen shot of ‘Bevel Perspective left, White’ formatting effect added to a video shown below.