Insert Video (Movie) Clips in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Do you want to add a video clip within your PowerPoint slide? Before you do so, spare a thought for the plenty of wrong reasons why people add video clips to their slides. Many clips are just added to grab attention, or just because the presenter thinks that a video clip will add some oomph! Fortunately, there are a few good reasons to adding video clips -- let us explore these, and then show you how you can add a video clip to your slide in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. Here are the good reasons:

You need to show how a machine process works, and a recorded video clip is far more simpler to insert than animating the entire sequence.
An important person cannot attend an event and sends his or her message as a recorded video clip -- you insert this on the first slide.
You want to show recorded video coverage to strengthen your point-of-view.
Finally, the video clip should add value to the presentation and be beneficial to your audience.

Some points that you should consider while inserting a video clip in PowerPoint 2010 are:

Your presentation should have been saved at least once before inserting the video.
Your video clip should be in a PowerPoint friendly file format.
Preferably, copy any movie/video file you want to insert to the same folder which includes the presentation. (important only if you want to link videos from your slides).

The last option ensures that your video links always work -- this is less of a problem with PowerPoint 2010 since this version embeds any inserted videos as part of the presentation itself -- we explain this further later on this page. Now, follow these steps to learn how to insert a video clip in PowerPoint 2010:

Open your presentation and navigate to the slide where you want to insert a video clip. From the Insert tab of Ribbon, click the lower half of the Video button to bring up the menu shown in Figure 1. Then choose the Video from File option.

Figure 1: Video from File option
This brings up the Insert Video dialog box, as shown in Figure 2. Locate the folder where your videos are saved, and select any video clip you want to insert by clicking on it.

Figure 2: Insert Video dialog
You can now click the Insert button (refer to Figure 2 above) -- this option adds the movie to the slide and also embeds it as part of your presentation. This behavior is changed in PowerPoint 2010 compared to earlier versions which did not embed any inserted video or movie clips. This of course can balloon the file size -- and you can still link the video or movie clip rather than embedding it by following the alternative option explained next.

To link rather than embed, click on the down-arrow next to the Insert button (see Figure 3). This brings up a menu with two options:
- Insert (which is the same as discussed in the preceding paragraph) and Link to file.
- Link to File which links the video. Note that if you choose to link rather than embed, always copy your video or movie clip to the same folder as your presentation before you insert it within your slide.
- Show previous versions allows you to open a previous version of the video (if it exists). This option is based on native functionality available in recent versions of Microsoft Windows.
  
  Figure 3: Link to File option
Whichever option you choose (as explained above), PowerPoint will place the video at the center of the slide as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Video placed on slide
Click on the video to play, or use the Play button on the Player Controls (shown below the video clip, as shown in Figure 4 above). You can also set the video to play automatically after the slide shows -- to do that select the video so that the two Video Tool contextual tabs of the Ribbon are visible. Click the Video Tools Playback contextual tab of the Ribbon to activate it as shown in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5: Video Tools Playback tab of the Ribbon

This tab offers you different options to control the playback of the video you have selected. Locate the Start drop-down list as shown in Figure 6, and select the Automatically option.

Figure 6: Automatically playing mode
Save your presentation.