Rix Bits

Spike Lee is the acclaimed director of such films as Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, and Inside Man. To create these classics, I’m sure Spike used many different kinds of film editing technologies throughout the years. That being said, I’d still bet that PowerPoint is not one of the tools he ever thought about using.

But even though PowerPoint won’t necessarily give you the same cinematic skills to qualify your video as a Spike Lee Joint, we’ll see in Part 2 of our series that it does have the ability to do some pretty interesting things with videos that you might want to add to your presentation.

 

Insert Web-based Videos

Perhaps you want to show a YouTube video to help bring home a point that you’re trying to make in a presentation. PowerPoint makes it easy to not only insert a YouTube video, but [in PowerPoint 2013] it also helps connect you to your SkyDrive account, or to do a general web search for your video:

Edit Your Own Videos

There’s an nice list of controls available to you in the Playback tab of the Ribbon once you’ve clicked on your video in a PowerPoint presentation:

As you can see, this includes things like trimming out unwanted parts of the beginning or end of your video, as well controlling the audio in your video.

 

Transform Your Videos with Effects

 

Here’s a demonstration of a PowerPoint presentation (featuring my Boxer Kwali) that shows how some of these effects and transformations can be used:

 

 

Export your Presentation as a Video

The demo above started as a PowerPoint presentation, but in order to show it to you in all it’s glory (without making you download the file), I decided to Export it as a video. PowerPoint gives lots of options for this process:

In fact, I recently used this feature to make a video out of an animation my 11-year old nephew created using PowerPoint (Pixar, here we come!):

 

So, although we have many different video editing tools at our fingertips these days, it’s nice to know that one of the tools that we’ve known for so long can serve the dual purpose of presenting not only text and images, but video as well. Stay tuned for Part 3!