PowerPoint.Advanced.Presentation.Techniques [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Setting Movie Options

Video clips are a lot like sounds in terms of what you can do with them. You can specify that they should play when you point at them or click them (with their Action Settings), or you can make them play, pause, and stop at a certain time (with Custom Animation).

Playing on Mouse Click or Mouse Over

When you insert a clip, its default play setting depends on the choice you made in the dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-3. It will either be set up to play on mouse click (if you chose On Click), or it will be set up through Custom Animation to play automatically after the slide begins (if you chose Automatically).

In addition, just like with sounds, you can change the Action Settings, if desired, to adjust the clip's Mouse Over and Mouse Click settings. To do so, right-click the clip and choose Action Settings. Then, on the Mouse Click and Mouse Over tabs make your selections, as you did with sounds in Chapter 12. Many of the options will not be available; mostly you will be choosing between None and Object Action: Play (see Figure 14-4).

Figure 14-4: Control a clip's Mouse Over and/or Mouse Click settings in its Action Settings dialog box.

Controlling a Clip's Volume and Appearance

If you are working with a real video clip (not an animated GIF), you can also edit the movie object controls. These controls enable you to specify whether the video plays in a continuous loop or not, and which frame of the movie remains on the screen when it is finished (the first or the last). You can also control whether any clip controls appear on the slide.

To check them out, right-click the movie clip on the slide and choose Edit Movie Object. The Movie Options dialog box appears (see Figure 14-5). From here you can do the following:

Mark the Loop until stopped checkbox if desired, to make the clip repeat until you move to the next slide or until you click it to pause it.

Mark the Rewind movie when done playing checkbox if you want the first frame of the clip to appear on-screen after the clip has finished; otherwise the last frame will appear there.

Set the sound volume for the clip in relation to the overall sound for the presentation by clicking the Sound volume icon and then dragging the slider. This works just like it did for sounds in Chapter 12.

Mark the Hide while not playing checkbox if desired, to make the clip go away when it is not playing. Do this only if the clip will play automatically, because if you set it to On Click and it's hidden, you won't be able to find it to click it.

Mark the Zoom to full screen checkbox if you want the clip to play in full-screen size. (This is not such a great idea if the clip is low-resolution and you have a large monitor, because it will look all grainy.)

Figure 14-5: You can control some play options from this dialog box for movie files.

Understanding Custom Animation Play Options for Video

When you place a movie clip on a slide and set it to play automatically, the Custom Animation task pane (choose Slide Show⇨Custom Animation) will have two entries for it by default: Play and Pause. For example, in Figure 14-6, it's set to play automatically when the slide appears and to pause when clicked. If you set it to play When Clicked when you insert it, you'll only have the Pause trigger.

Figure 14-6: These two entries represent a single movie clip. The top one starts it playing automatically, and the second one pauses the clip when you click it.

Before setting the custom animation properties for the clip, it's important to select carefully. If you click the clip on the slide, both of the animation triggers for that object become selected at once (there'll be a gray box around each of them). If you then open the menu for either clip and choose Timing or Effect Options, the Effect Options dialog box appears, with settings that refer to all instances of custom animation for the clip. However, if you select only one of the animation triggers and then right-click and choose Timing or Effect Options, either a Play Movie or Pause Movie dialog box will appear, and those settings refer only to that instance of animation.

Controlling When the Video Will Play

You can control the play timing for real video clips (not animated GIFs) through the Custom Animation box. These settings enable you to specify whether the video should playp automatically when the slide appears and whether there should be a delay before it, much like with sound clips (as discussed in Chapter 12).

These controls are accessed from the Custom Animation task pane (choose Slide Show⇨Custom Animation). After selecting the appropriate item, right-click it and choose Timing. A dialog box opens with the Timing tab on top. Depending on what you selected, the dialog box may be called Effect Options, Play Movie, or Pause Movie.

Here are the settings that all three of those dialog boxes have in common:

Start: Your choices are On Click, With Previous, or After Previous.

Delay: This is the delay in seconds between the Start event described previously and the clip playing.

In addition, the Play Movie dialog box has these additional items:

Repeat: Choose how many times you want the clip to repeat before it stops.

Rewind when done playing: If you want the last frame of the movie to remain on-screen after it completes, leave this checkbox unmarked. If you want the first frame to reappear, mark this checkbox.

All of these dialog boxes have a Triggers button that displays or hides the extra trigger options, just like with sounds in Chapter 12. Triggers specify when the action should occur. They enable you to trigger an event as a result of clicking the event object itself or on something else. For example, you can place a movie on the slide and have it play when someone clicks a button that you create with AutoShapes. You could also create a Pause AutoShape that would trigger a pause event, or you can leave the settings as they are. A pause trigger that allows you to pause the movie by clicking on it is inserted by default when you insert the movie.

Specifying Where a Clip Will Begin

Just like with sounds, you can specify that a video clip should play from some point other than the beginning and should continue through a certain number of slides and then stop. Because you probably would not want a video clip to continue to play after you have moved past its slide, the stopping portion is less useful for videos than for sounds. However, the Start feature can be very helpful in trimming off any portion of the beginning of the clip that you don't want.

To set the start point for the clip, you must have the Play event of the custom animation selected-not the Pause event or the clip itself. (See the description in the preceding section.)

Open the Play Movie dialog box by right-clicking the Play event and choosing Effect Options. If you get the Pause Movie dialog box when you do this, you are in the wrong place; try again.

From there, in the Start Playing section of the Effect tab (see Figure 14-7), choose the desired starting point:

From beginning: The default starting point.

From last position: The starting point will be at whatever point it was paused or stopped earlier. If it was not paused or stopped earlier, the starting point is the beginning.

From time: The starting point will be a certain number of seconds into the clip. (You specify the number of seconds.)

Figure 14-7: Specify the starting and stopping points for the clip.

Then, in the Stop Playing section, if desired, set up the video to stop either on a click, after the current slide, or after a specified number of slides.

Sizing the Video Clip Window

You can resize a video clip's window just like any other object. Simply drag its selection handles. Be careful, however, that you do not distort the image by resizing in only one dimension. Make sure you drag a corner selection handle, not one on a single side of the object.

Be aware that when you enlarge a video clip's window, the quality of the clip suffers. If you make the clip too large and are unhappy with its quality, you can reset it to its original size: right-click the clip and choose Format Picture, and on the Size tab, click Reset.