Wednesday, March 16, 2011

PowerPoint Tip: Quickly adding iPhone or iPad videos to your presentation

Last week the new iPad2 joined the lineup of popular Apple devices that have video cameras. The desire to use those videos in our presentation is a hot topic. One of my consulting clients will be using his iPhone videos this year to show testimonials. I used my iPhone to demonstrate taking and using video in a recent CSAE presentation. And I included the topic in last month’s webinar on Incorporating Video in Your PowerPoint Presentations.

So how do you use video from an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch in your presentation? There are four steps I want to cover in this article. One important thing to realize is that you don’t need to use iTunes to get your video off your device. This means you can take a video and use it even if you aren’t at your home PC that you use to sync your iPhone or iPad. Here’s how you can use these videos in your presentation.

First, connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer and wait for it to be recognized. If you have iTunes on this computer, it usually automatically opens up, assuming you want to use iTunes. In this case we don’t. You usually get a notification from Windows that the device has been connected and it allows you to view the files in Windows Explorer (you can just open Windows Explorer to view the files even if you don’t get the automatic notification). This is what you want to do. Find the video file you want on your device and copy it to your computer using the normal file copying techniques.

Most of the time you will want to edit the video clip to remove any extra segments that are not needed to make the one point you are using it for. To convert the video to the WMV format that is preferred by PowerPoint on Windows, use the online conversion tool at www.online-convert.com. It is a quick tool that does a great job.

Third, edit the video using Windows Live Movie Maker, which is a free download from Microsoft’s web site. It is easy to use and includes a good tool to clip some time off the front or back of a video. Microsoft has some good tutorials on using this tool online here. Output the video in at least a 640 x 480 resolution so it will be easy for the audience to see it.

The last step is to insert the movie clip on a slide in your presentation. PowerPoint makes this easy when you click on Insert – Movie. Select the option to play the video automatically and as soon as you go to that slide, your video will play.

By becoming comfortable with these steps, you can start to quickly incorporate videos from your iPhone or iPad2 into your presentations. If you’d like more details on using video in your presentation, check out the recording of my webinar on this topic by clicking here.

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