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Using Downloaded Video Clips in Powerpoint

Let's begin by acknowledging up-front that working with video can be very frustrating because of the many different video formats and, especially, the different settings that are used within each of those formats! We are doing our best in ETO to try and streamline the conversion and usage issues to fit exactly what we find our faculty members are wanting to accomplish when using video clips. Working with video is not for the faint at heart especially if you are trying to do it without large expenditures of money. There are, in some cases, commercial products that make the use of video with, for example, Powerpoint, easier, but they do come with a price tag.

That all said, adding video clips to a Powerpoint presentation is fairly straightforward as it works the same way as inserting imagesonto a slide: from the "Insert" menu, select "Movies and Sound" and then "Movie from file..." You then navigate/browse to where the video clip (i.e., "movie ") is stored and select it. Voila! a window for your video clip appears in your Powerpoint slide! When you insert a video clip in a presentation, however, we recommend that you store the clip in the same folder as the presentation and make sure that you copy all of the folder contents if you move your presentation from, say, your office hard drive to a portable flash drive, memory stick, or external hard drive! So, you should save the clips in that folder before you go through the steps in Powerpoint to insert the clip in your presentation.

So, that seems pretty easy, doesn't it? And, it is, IF the video clip is in a format that Powerpoint recognizes and can play! Through experimenting with the conversion of video clips downloaded from YouTube using the RealPlayer download feature, we have found that converting the downloaded files (which are in a proprietary format not compatible with the MCI Player used by Powerpoint) to the MPEG (file extension: .mpg) format makes them playable.

For this Tech-Tip we are going to focus on using a video clip we download from YouTube and convert to the MPG format so we can insert it in a Powerpoint presentation. In order to follow along in this step-by-step tutorial, you will need to first download and install two free programs: Real's RealPlayer and NCH Software's Prism Video Converter.
 
   
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