Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Converting Quicktime MOV files for use in PowerPoint

Many video files today come to us in Apple's QuickTime MOV file format. And that causes a problem when we want to insert it on a slide since PowerPoint for Windows does not natively play QuickTime files. One solution is to convert the file to a format that PowerPoint can play.

Geetesh Bajaj of www.indezine.com recently wrote a great article on converting QuickTime MOV files using a free video tool program. Read the whole article at: http://www.indezine.com/products/video/convertquicktimetoaviwithradtools.html . I downloaded the tool he suggested and tried it on one of my slide makeover video podcasts and it worked very well.

I would suggest you follow his suggestion to convert to the AVI format, but don't stop there. Then use Windows Movie Maker to convert the file to a Windows Media Video (WMV) format file. Why? Because it it much smaller than an AVI file. In my test, a 3.56 MB MOV file was converted to a 272 MB AVI file, which is so much larger because it is essentially uncompressed. I then used the default settings in Windows Movie Maker to convert it to a 8.04 MB WMV file. The WMV file can then be easily used in PowerPoint because it is the default format for video files in PowerPoint.

Another benefit to this extension of the conversion process is that you can then edit the clip if needed because Movie Maker has editing features.

Try the above procedure the next time you are given a QuickTime MOV file to use in your presentation.

3 Comments:

Blogger Frank Fulchiero said...

The only problem then is that the PowerPoint will not show the video on a Mac. There is no way to use PowerPoint with the same video file on both OSX and Windows, unless you create a hyperlink to a QuickTime movie. And often, depending on the PP version, you have to click through a security warning before you can play it. No way to bypass this.
Pretty dumb on Microsoft's part, in my opinion, not to easily allow cross-platform PP with video.

8:55 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Thank you man, great post it was exactly what I was looking for. u've made my work much simpler. GOOD JOB!!!

6:22 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

YES, while i've got videos with MTS format, I do like to convert MTS to QuickTime MOV for use.
Thank you for your nice share.

9:57 PM  

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