How To Edit and Add Video Clips to Powerpoint Presentations

Another Teacher Tech Article for you. This is for anyone who would like to edit a video clip from a video file or from a DVD and add that video clip to your PowerPoint presentation. There are several steps in this process - some of which you might not need if you already have a video clip on your hard drive.

1. If you want to get a clip from a DVD, you will first need to convert the movie to a file format usable in PowerPoint - NOTE: If you already have your file on the hard drive in an mpg, wmv or avi format go on to the next step. Download and install the freeware application Handbrake. Once you run Handbrake, Insert your DVD into the DVD Player. Select the Browse button and select the movie if it doesn't load it automatically.

You then need to select the "select title" button and choose the movie title if there is more then one movie on the DVD. In the destination section select your file format to be avi and type in the name you want to use for the clip. There are many additional options you can use to customize, but for simplicity, lets just click on the "encode" button. At this point it will begin to work behind the scenes to convert your movie to a usable avi video clip in the directory you chose to save it to. When it is complete, the window like the one in the photo below will say "complete" You can close it and move on to the next step.

2. Edit MPEG or AVI video files. Next we will edit the movie or video clips to show exactly the portion of the video you want included as a clip on your PowerPoint presentation. To do this we will use the free software provided with all Windows XP licenses called Movie Maker although you could use many other programs such as TMPencDVD Author for example . Find Windows Movie Maker on your PC (typically by selecting Start-Programs-Accessories) and open it. On the left under "capture video" you will see "import video". Select that and select your video clip from the appropriate folder. That will import the video and break it up into several smaller clips. For the next steps, watch the video below on how to use Windows Movie Maker to edit the video clip:

One thing you might need to do in Windows Movie Maker is to increase or decrease the volume level of the video clip. To do that, on the Audio or Audio/Music track of the timeline, select the audio clip whose volume you want to adjust. Then click Clip, point to Audio, and then click Volume. To adjust the volume, do one of the following:

To reduce the volume, slide the Audio volume level slider to the left.

To increase the volume, slide the Audio volume level slider to the right.

To mute the clip, select the Mute clip check box.

To reset the volume to the original volume, click Reset.

3. Add Clip to PowerPoint. Now that you've edited the video clip, just save it. There are two methods of playing video during a PowerPoint presentation.

You can embed the video clip into a slide by going to the point where you want the video inserted, select Insert Menu-Movies and Sounds+Movie from File. Find the movie file in your folder and double-click on it. PowerPoint will then import the file and then you can reposition or resize the clip.

A second method is to embed a WMV file in the slide itself. This way you will have the Windows Media Player controls (play, pause etc) beneath the clip which is nice for longer video clips.

Its best to keep your video clips small for size and better presentation.

For further information on adding video clips to PowerPoint, check out this Microsoft help document. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to comment below.