When you insert a video clip within a PowerPoint slide, you'll find it
placed as a traditional rectangular shape. And while that's exactly what most users expect, it does seem safe and conventional. However,
PowerPoint 2013 does allow you to have your video playing in different shapes such as a
circle or oval, or a wave, a triangle, or any of the shapes that PowerPoint
includes. Just the fact that a video can be placed within a shape is no reason to forego the conventional rectangle. Do remember that most other
shapes may crop out important parts of your video clips.
In the following tutorial, we will explain how you can constrain your video to play within a specific shape:
- Open your presentation, and navigate to the required slide where you have already
inserted a video clip. Just select or double-click the video clip to bring
up the two Video Tools tabs in the Ribbon. These two tabs are
Format and Playback. Click the Format tab to activate it, as shown in Figure 1
(highlighted in red).
Figure 1: Video Tools Format tab of the Ribbon
- When you insert a video on your slide, it may display a black rectangle on the slide (see Figure 1, above). If your video clip
does not show a black rectangle, then directly proceed to Step 3.
If you see the black rectangle in place of the video clip, then you will have to add a
Poster Frame to your video clip, as shown in
Figure 2 below.
What’s a Poster Frame?
A Poster Frame is a still picture from your video clip. You can manually choose a Poster Frame, especially if you see just a black rectangle
on your slide, at the time of inserting the video clip. When you are choose different
Video Effects, it is good to see
a
live preview of the actual video clip being applied with those
Video Effects, rather than seeing a black rectangle. Anyhow, applying a
Poster Frame is entirely optional, and has no
relation to your being able to follow the rest of this tutorial.
Figure 2: Video clip with a poster frame added
- Within the Video Tools Format tab, click the Video Shape button (highlighted in
blue within Figure 1, shown earlier on this page) to access the Video Shape drop-down
gallery that you can see in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Video Shape drop-down gallery
Note: The
Video Shape drop-down gallery is similar to
Shapes gallery in PowerPoint 2013.
- Now, select any shape from the Video Shape drop-down gallery that suits your requirements. For this tutorial, we have chosen the
Isosceles Triangle, as shown in Figure 3 above.
- This constrains the selected video within the Isosceles Triangle shape. Play your video at least once to ensure that no important parts get
cropped out. Figure 4 shows previously inserted video playing within the Isosceles Triangle.
Figure 4: Video within the Isosceles Triangle shape
Once the shape of the video is changed, you can use the Video Effects,
Video Border, and the
Video Styles to enhance its look.
Rectange or Rounded Rectangle?
Try using shapes that are similar to a conventional rectangle such as a Rounded Rectangle or any of the Snipped rectangles (see
Figure 5 below). This way you can prevent large areas of the video from being cropped out when a shape is added. Even then, make sure
you preview your video clip to make sure that no important areas are cropped off.
Figure 5: Shapes similar to a rectangle work good as Video Shapes
- Make sure you save your presentation.
See Also:
Video Shape in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows
Movie Shape in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac
Video Shape in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows
