Most of the time, you’re limited to basic slides with bullet points and a couple of images or tables thrown in. At least those were the standards of all the presentations I’ve witnessed. At times, someone would throw in a sound clip of two to spice it up. But I’ve rarely seen presentations with video clips in them. It’s a shame because a picture really is worth a thousand words.

A simple reason for the lack of video is that unless you had the clip on your computer, you could not really do anything. Nowadays though, all you need to do is hunt around in any online video-sharing site and 9 times out of 10 you will find a clip that meets your requirements. I’ll use Youtube as an example since it’s one of the most popular sites.

The major part is getting your clip onto your machine, in a format you can use. This is important because the ‘flv’ format is not particularly media player friendly. I usually use MediaCoder when I convert files but a good online alternative is Vixy. Just copy the url of your video file, select your desired file format and click ‘Start’. The most common file format is ‘avi’ so it’s a good idea to select that one. Vixy will do all the work for you and at the end will give you a link to the converted file. You can download this file to your computer.

Adding the video to your presentation is easy. Save the video in the same folder as your presentation since you’ll need to take it along with you if you’re transferring the presentation to a portable device. To place the video in a slide, navigate to the slide you want. Then, go to the menu and select Insert > Movies & Sounds > Movie from file. Choose the movie you saved and click OK. All that’s left is to choose whether you want the video to start automatically or only when you click on it.

How often do you add videos to your presentations? Can you do this with any of the online presentation applications?

Via [DigitalAlchemy.tv]